config per directory?

[saratoga]

I simply mean that a small 'bump' in between different config files, where things like crossfading and gapless playback fail, would probably for most users (who would use the feature anyway) be a worthwhile price. And I'm guessing (with no relevant knowledge at all, admittedly) that that's what stopping and restarting the buffer would entail.

Buffering doesn't really matter to gapless or crossfade.  Rather its about efficient use of the hard disk.  On a typical hard disk based player you can only read the disk about twice an hour, so you have to figure out what config you're going to need a while in the future, load all of them, and then switch to them later. 

[oayz]

Pardon my arrogance but again what's the difference between this feature and album art?

[saratoga]

Pardon my arrogance but again what's the difference between this feature and album art?

If you can figure out how to get this to work with a JPEG, be my guest!

[Llorean]

What about the ability to include .cfg files in playlists? Rather than loading folder .cfgs, just playlist them up like any other item, so if a user has a .cfg as the first item in their folder, and they insert the whole folder, it gets queued up as well? Probably best to ignore .cfgs in insert/queue shuffled scenarios, though.

This would also allow some flexibility for those who manually create playlists as well, by allowing them to set various .cfg files to trigger at certain times, such as loading preferred EQ presets for different albums, or whatnot.

[torne]

Pardon my arrogance but again what's the difference between this feature and album art?

Not a lot. Adding album art support required messing around with a bunch of playback and buffering stuff. So will this.

Llorean: What about cfg files which change settings which affect order of play, though? What do you do if the cfg file halfway through sets shuffled to on? (toggling shuffle was explicitly one of the things requested, which makes sense, you don't want to shuffle audiobooks). Or the reverse: what about if shuffle is on now, and you start a playlist that should include a cfg file which disables shuffle, but it doesn't play the cfg file until halfway through?

[Confuseling]

Buffering doesn't really matter to gapless or crossfade.  Rather its about efficient use of the hard disk.  On a typical hard disk based player you can only read the disk about twice an hour, so you have to figure out what config you're going to need a while in the future, load all of them, and then switch to them later. 

I had no idea it was so long - thanks for the clarification.

I still think the point stands, in that the vast majority of people probably don't mix audiobooks / podcasts and music in one playlist, which is undoubtedly the main use case for this. I don't know whether the people that do jump back and forth between them a lot, but I suspect not.

For people who are going to delve into the manual to find a feature like this, they can find a warning about battery life / hard disk wear there. If they use it for different styles of music, they're going to be doing it in full knowledge of the risks.

If it proved popular for such uses, worry about reading ahead then. I like Llorean's suggestion though - don't really know enough about shuffling to know whether Torne's point is fatal. Couldn't you just honour any apparently contradictory requests, and let the user sort it out?

[gevaerts]

Is per-directory config really that involved?

Is there a reason why a simple callback for PLAYBACK_EVENT_TRACK_CHANGE events (using add_event()) that checks the path of the playing file (to see if it changed since last time), checks if there's a config file there (with a specific name), and loads that config file if it's there, can't work? (except for the callback possibly being calld in an unsuitable thread, but that can be fixed easily)

Of course this would only load config files, so the user has to make sure that each such config file contains all settings that might have been changed in a previous directory. It wouldn't be too hard to also have "directory leaving" config files to make handling that a bit easier, but I think that that might not always work well.

[torne]

gevaerts: that would mean spinning up the disk on every directory change... and either way, the fact that some of the desired per-directory config settings affect playback order (shuffle, repeat) is fairly significant..

[gevaerts]

that would mean spinning up the disk on every directory change...

Yes, unless dircache is enabled (in which case there's only a spin up for loading a file). That's no worse than some other settings we have (auto-change directory...)

I imagine this entire thing would be a setting though(one which is probably not very suitable for per-directory config files .

If the system would support looking in parent directories (similar to the album art search), I imagine most use cases (the ones that want e.g. different settings for audiobooks and music) won't really suffer from these extra spin ups (again, assuming dircache). Only people who want per-album setiings or similar would notice.

Either way, the fact that some of the desired per-directory config settings affect playback order (shuffle, repeat) is fairly significant..

Yes, definitely. I think it's a case of Don't Do That Then. People *can* do stupid things if they want to, and I think this wouldn't be the first case.

[torne]

Controlling shuffle is one of the things the original poster in this thread (and people who've asked for similar things before) *specifically asked for*, and it's an obvious and logical thing to want if you normally listen to music on shuffle but also have audiobooks... so I don't think it's as simple as just saying don't do that

[gevaerts]

Again, I think it depends on how you're trying to use it.

Controlling shuffle will work in general, but some edge cases (maybe common cases, but still on the edge!) might be a bit annoying. I'm going to assume a two directory setup (there might be subdirectories, but I'm not going to care about those), one of which has e.g. audiobooks, the other one music. I assume the user wants shuffle for music, not for other things.

Suppose you enable shuffle in the music config, and disable it for audiobooks, several things can happen:

• There's a playlist with both music and audiobooks (like soap described earlier). As soon as music plays, shuffle gets turned on, things play randomly until an audiobook track starts, after which shuffle gets turned off and audiobooks keep playing until the end. Most probably not what the user wants.
• The current playlist has only audiobooks. The user starts playing music (possibly from a playlist file, or maybe a database selection,...). The first track that plays will always be the same, after that behaviour is as expected. Not perfect, but possibly acceptable (adding a very short silent audio file named ' .mp3' will work around the issue...)
• The current playlist has only music (and is therefore shuffled). The user wants to listen to audiobooks. There are two cases
  • This is a new audiobook, so the user selects the first track of the audiobook.
    • If Play Selected First is enabled, things will work as expected
    • If Play Selected First is *not* enabled, behaviour will be wrong
  • This is an audiobook in progress, the user picks a bookmark. The playlist may look weird for a second until the settings are fixed, but I *think* the behaviour will be as expected.

So in summary, I think that while shuffle can indeed mess up things if used without thinking, it would be possible to make a well-behaved system that can do shuffle.

[soap]

This feature has been discussed at least two times in the past.

I think a more common usage case would be album-specific audio settings (EQ, etc.)   

[oayz]

I think a more common usage case would be album-specific audio settings (EQ, etc.)   

Shuffle was the one to make me open this thread. It's distructive - on few occasions I have it ON for playing music and forget to turn off switching back to audiobooks. 10 chapters later I relalized it's not a crazy athor, it's my stupidity :-)

Please remember that it's not simple music/books case. Even for music you may want to have shuffle of for album and on for compilations.

[Llorean]

I find the easiest way to do this is to "insert shuffled" a folder I want to listen to shuffled, and never turn on the actual shuffle option. It works great.

[oayz]

Thanks for the tip! If this thread will die I'd definetly use it. The problem is that most of the time I decide to shuffle when I already playing (got bored with same order). Also "insert shuffle" will not work for auto-change directory, will it?

Local config covers it all ...