Secondary start screen?

[unknownsoldierx]

I prefer to have 'now playing' as my start screen.  But if there is no song to resume from the last session, it goes to the main screen.  It would be great if there was an option for a secondary start screen, so that I could set it to go to the database screen instead of the main screen.

[torne]

Sounds useful actually, so I'll see about implementing it

As far as the UI for configuring this.. I was thinking we could remove Now Playing from the startup screen selection, and have a yes/no toggle for "Resume playback on power on" instead - the startup screen choice would then be used if there was nothing to resume or if resuming was disabled. Does that sound sensible?

[unknownsoldierx]

Sounds perfect to me.

[Llorean]

There used to be a "resume playback on startup" option that was replaced with the startup screen option.

Isn't there an option to start up on the screen you shut down on? Wouldn't that solve this problem? If the music was launched from the database, then you'd either shut down to resume playback when you booted back up, or if music had ended, you'd boot back up into the database.

[torne]

I didn't realise it used to be that way, but yah, I'm suggesting re-adding that setting and removing WPS from the choice of startup screen.

I can't try it at the moment because I'm battery benching but I don't think setting it to return to the last screen will work on all players - on the ipod holding play/pause triggers 'stop' first before poweroff and thus I *presume* the last screen would be wherever stop chooses to return to, not the WPS, even if there was something to resume.

[Llorean]

Maybe a solution would be to note if the key was never release from Playback->Stop->Shutdown and if this is true, treat it as if playback was the last thing happening.

Reintroducing an option that was intentionally removed is going to be difficult unless you have a really, really solid reason why it's needed now but wasn't before.

[torne]

Well, it's not quite the same option, if before it was just resume or not. I'm not committed on this or anything, just saw the OP and thought "actually yes i'd probably like that"

When my battery bench is done I'll experiment and see what the last screen thing does, and if there's some reasonably sane way to have it work if it doesn't. (battery benching takes ages now! clearly too many of the power usage problems have been fixed

[torne]

I've tested it and no, it doesn't work: if you set start screen to return to the last screen, the ipods (and presumably anything else where poweroff is a longer press of the same button as stop) will never start on the WPS. Fixing the last screen tracking to do this differently is probably a lot more work than having a boolean 'resume' setting, and doesn't really provide the same use case anyway (since if you want to always start on the database screen, any time you go to another screen and then power off it will not go back to the database, obviously

[pondlife]

I've tested it and no, it doesn't work: if you set start screen to return to the last screen, the ipods (and presumably anything else where poweroff is a longer press of the same button as stop) will never start on the WPS.

This is not true for the H300.  The same button is used for stop (short press) and shut down (long press).  If you do a long press it will shut down directly from the WPS and the Previous Screen option works exactly as you'd want it to.

IIUC, the iPod has 3 actions on the one button - pause (short press), stop (long press) and shut down (very long press).  I'd think that this ought to still be workable in the same manner as the H300, but I've never used one personally.

pondlife

[torne]

Hm, interesting that it's different..

I'm wondering if the OP is still around and has tried out the last screen option to see if it does what they want?

[Llorean]

The difference between h300 and iPod:

On H300 you can tap "Stop" to stop blindly. Or you can hold "Stop" to shutdown *without* stopping.

On the iPod we need to stop without waiting for button release, or trying to stop playback without shutting down becomes a timing game in which the user has to guess "have I held it down long enough to stop yet, or am I going to just pause?" Currently a user can just hold down the button and as soon as they hear the audio stop, release it. The audio will be stopped, and there's a good deal of time before the shutdown happens so accidents will be rare.

It can probably be fixed on iPod, but it shouldn't be done in the same manner as H300 - rather the stop should probably still happen but Rockbox should "remember" if the button hasn't been released yet if the user continues on to shut down the player and act as if audio hadn't stopped on the next boot.