desperatly looking for a language-course friendly mp3-player...

[tormen]

Hi.

I am desperatly looking for a very simple and yet so usefull feature:
To be a real "study aid" for listening to my language course I would need to easily skip a customisable amount of seconds forward and/or backword:

As most players have only TWO buttons for skip+ff:
E.g. to press shortly on the skip/FF button to jump/skip a avariable amount of seconds forward
And to press LONG on the skip/FF button to jump/skip a whole track

Or even better to have (customizable) four buttons:

skip forward   AND   skip backward:
     short = x skip seconds
     long = search through song / fast forward

skip to next track  AND  skip to last track

And on top an easy way to switch between this button setting and another (the normal/usual) one...

Does anyone have a hint for me, if with some player or addon/plugin this is already possible somehow?!


Greetings,

tormen


P.S.:
I was really hoping to find some sort of customization like:
a list of all button-events:
e.g. button 1 short, button 1 long, button 2...

And a list of all functions:
skip x seconds and x element {1, 2, ... 600}
skip track
fast-forward x-times and x element {1,2,... 60}
circle through a list of x button-settings and then a list of x button-settings
play
pause
stop
stop after this track
stop after x seconds or minutes (when you want to begin to sleep while listening to something)
...

and then one could map the functions on the buttons as he/she likes it and save this as one button-setting.

This would be the most flexible solution.

I read in the wiki about AllKeysCustomizable, but I disagree that no one would need this: see my case for listening to a language course where you have to repeat what you hear and need very often (or constantly ;-) to go back to listen to something again.

If someone knows if this is planned or if it is even somewhere in the pipeline already: Please tell me. I am really thinking about starting to develop something like this.

[(:@)]

You can use the sncviewer plugin:
- in the menu choose: "auto cue"
- set the interval: x minutes (not seconds, but you can easily change it in the source file)

-> will create a list of "tracks" with the chosen interval

now you can browse through the tracks you've created and jump to one of them:
e.g.
0:00 Track1
1:00 Track2
2:00 Track3
...

additional functions:
- adjust time
- rename label (TrackX)
- add, remove tracks
- set a-b to repeat
- ...

[major4579]

Tormen,

I know exactly what you want and I want it too.

I have a Cowon U2 that does just this (unfortunately no longer made). In the settings you could change a quick press of the FF and RR buttons to mean either Go To Next/Prev Track or Skip Forward/Back xx Seconds (with a choice of xx from 1 sec to 60 secs).

I really miss this and would love to be able to duplicate it with Rockbox on my Sansa e200....

-John

[mborus]

If someone knows if this is planned or if it is even somewhere in the pipeline already: Please tell me. I am really thinking about starting to develop something like this.

Don't know if this is planned, but it has been requested to have a study mode a few times over the years.
I'd like it to behave similar to your idea like this:

- You get to define a Skip second interval. (i.e. x seconds)

- When you press Skip forward, the current remaining time of the track is analysed.
If the remaining time is more than x seconds, you skip forward x seconds. If it's less,
you skip to the next track.

- When you press Skip backwards, the current elased time of the track is analysed.
If the elapsed time is more than x seconds, you skip backwards x seconds. If it's less,
you skip to the beginning of this track track. Exception: If you skip backwards within the
first few seconds (let's say five) you skip to the previous track.

- The interval X shouldn't be limited to 60 seconds. My favorite skip would be 330 seconds, as this is the length of the average song I want to skip in lengthy radio recordings.

[major4579]

I may have mis remembered about the upper limit - it really could be anything. In looking back at the U2 manual I see that:

In Play Mode, a Short FF will skip forward xx seconds.
In Pause/Stop Mode, a Short FF will skip to the next track.

This gets my strong support...

John