Rockbox Development > Feature Ideas

config per directory?

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oayz:
On many occasions I wish if RB can automatically switch some configuration parameters based on the current directory. For example:
- some music directories are better to be shuffled
- full albums are not
- audio books should never be shuffled
- for audio books different EQ may be preferred
- resume, rewind on resume etc - good for audio books, bad for music
etc.

To take care of all these and possibly other differences let's allow "local" configuration files. Basically if current directory has CFG file it will be parsed and applied.

Though idea and implementation seems trivial there is a question how to treat nested directories (should we revert hierarchically revert back or go back to root default.cfg).

funman:
It sounds like a job for playlist files (m3u)

[Saint]:

--- Quote from: oayz on September 07, 2010, 08:21:15 PM ---On many occasions I wish if RB can automatically switch some configuration parameters based on the current directory. For example:
- some music directories are better to be shuffled
- full albums are not
- audio books should never be shuffled
- for audio books different EQ may be preferred
- resume, rewind on resume etc - good for audio books, bad for music
etc.

To take care of all these and possibly other differences let's allow "local" configuration files. Basically if current directory has CFG file it will be parsed and applied.

Though idea and implementation seems trivial there is a question how to treat nested directories (should we revert hierarchically revert back or go back to root default.cfg).


--- End quote ---


Well, .m3u playlists can certainly help in some respects here...but it isn't the "solution".
In saying that, neither is my suggestion likely to be viewed as the "solution" for the original poster, but, I personally see it as being a lot more versatile...read on:

While you cannot configure Rockbox to load a specific .cfg file on entering a directory, you can most certainly create individual .cfg files and keep them in the folders where you intend to use them, simply remebering to "run" the .cfg before you listen to the content inside the directory.

With this you can set every variable you mentioned in your request...every variable/setting that Rockbox offers, in fact.

You can also configure a "fixed.cfg" to return your DAP to a default state (or, a state of your choosing) each time that Rockbox is booted to avoid having to remember to reset the config files each time.

This is what I do for these cases, and it works very well for me.



[St.]

Confuseling:
I suppose a transparent way to do this automatically would be to have a config in a directory with a specific name (perhaps the name of the directory + .cfg) loaded automatically when you start playback from that directory. You could even have directives in the config, stating whether it applies recursively to subdirectories or not (making it default to something, so it's transparent again for users who don't want to care about this stuff). [ETA - or even just use 'automatic.cfg' and 'automatic.recursive.cfg' for names...] [ETA2 - now someone's going to chirp up and tell me there's an obscure prog-rock album from 1983 called 'automatic recursive'  :P]

I guess then it's only a question of usefulness versus binary size.

Edit - It does open up a slightly grey question though - do you ever want your MP3 player to do something like automatically ramp up the volume massively? It would only take one mistyped number in one config file to deafen yourself. You can make the case that that's no different from the present situation, but it always adds a different dimension when things happen without user intervention. Maybe you'd need a 'maximum volume to allow from config files' setting as well, complicating things somewhat...

oayz:
No this stuff should not go to playlist. Playlist is a playlist - I'm surprized we start to add things like pitch to it. It may be huge (1000's songs) so adding complexity to it doesn't make sense.

Having special predifined naming convention for local configs makes perfect sense (similar to naming conventions for album arts). This way we may keep configs in local directories or in centralized location.

I agree that saving volume is dangerous. OK, maybe we should not load volume at all. Maybe we should have incremental option (60 is absolute volume while +/-6 is relative to current setting). I don't think it's a showstopper - same danger happens when we change config manually.

The nice thing about original suggestion is it's simplicity and flexability. Just use original config parser and all options become available.

"St's" suggestion to use manual config read is fine but going trough several layers of menu to select appropriate config file evry time playlist takes you to new directory is a mess.

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