Move to a Random position in track button

[eLDeus]

Hello everyone, I wonder if someone thought about such thing - listening big length tracks such as audiobooks or lectures to be possible to jump to absolutely random place of a track with one button, it would be very handy in such situation feature? Thanks a lot!

[[Saint]]

Perhaps you have something in mind that is not immediately obvious to me.

I can't for the life of me imagine how this would be useful, and I can think of a few caveats right off the bat.

Generally speaking, even though people say it fairly often, I think that most people when they say "random" don't actually want true randomness in audio playback applications. True randomness in this situation would mean that you are equally like to skip to the exact same section of audio that you have just listened to as you are to skip to a new area of the track.

I am fairly confident that when 99.99% of people say they want random selection that they aren't aware that they actually want pseudo-randomness. Shuffle in Rockbox for instance, the entire playlist is shuffled randomly but the actual track selection ensures that each track is played precisely once.

I imagine you would want something similar in your desired implementation to ensure that the "random" playback didn't have an equal chance of skipping to a section of the track that you have already listened to. This is not impossible, but difficult, to manage.

Additionally there are basically no targets where this is even possible due to the already massively crowded keymap. It could be done, certainly, but it definitely wouldn't be a single button on most (all?) targets with hardware keys. It could be added as a selection candidate to our configurable hotkey system, and as a touchscreen area in the theme engine though I suppose.

One thing you could do yourself personally, although it isn't a complete fix to your request, would be create a config that you could load (say, Audiobook.cfg or...well, whatever, you get it) that changed the skip length from track skip to N minutes, although obviously N will be predetermined by you and not random you could use it to provide a way to jump in N minutes increments forwards and backwards in large tracks with a single button.

You could get reasonably quick access to this config by a couple of means, adding it to the shortcuts menu or the quickscreen and then loading it (shortcuts only jump to a file, they do not load it - perhaps they should, a cursory glance at the code suggests this would be possible), adding the config manager from the settings menu to the quickscreen, or just dumping the config file in the top-level of the filesystem (or wherever you have the file browser set to use) and using Files to get to it with the show files view setting configured as either supported or show all.

If you can present a situation for the use case that goes beyond "it would be cool if...", then please do so. If I am missing something please don't hesitate to tell me. I just think that feature suggestions really need to have a lot of thought put into their flaws and merits before implementation to flesh out the idea and ensure that Rockbox isn't just adding "settings because settings" in what is an already fairly crowded and complex system.


[Saint]

[eLDeus]

just need to push button and to hear random position in a track

[saratoga]

I don't think that feature would be widely enough used to make sense.

[Graham1]

My question is somewhat similar to this one. Say I had an album (say 12 tracks) which were contained within one file (say album.ogg). Would Rockbox be able to skip between tracks within this one file?

[saratoga]

No.

[[Saint]]

Say I had an album (say 12 tracks) which were contained within one file (say album.ogg).

Why would you even do this? What does having albums in this format actually achieve? I am genuinely curious about this, I can't see any obvious benefit to doing this, and with most rippers/encoders/transcoders this would take a notable amount of effort as opposed to ripping the tracks individually, which in my mind is infinitely more practical for any number of reasons.


[Saint]

[monoid]

I guess, it might be good in case of classical music or live music (where the sound is continuous and traks are more logical units than individual parts separated by silence).

Even this days not all music players are gapless, I guess....

Simply, having the whole thing in one file gives 100% garanty it will be played correctly regardless DAP used.

[monoid]

just need to push button and to hear random position in a track

I don't think that feature would be widely enough used to make sense.

I can imagine, it might be of interest for some people. It is equivalent to openning a book at random possition and reading few pages from that point.

[cereal_killer]

Maybe bookmarks or self created cue- sheets could help here?

[Graham1]

Say I had an album (say 12 tracks) which were contained within one file (say album.ogg).

Why would you even do this? What does having albums in this format actually achieve? I am genuinely curious about this, I can't see any obvious benefit to doing this, and with most rippers/encoders/transcoders this would take a notable amount of effort as opposed to ripping the tracks individually, which in my mind is infinitely more practical for any number of reasons.

[Saint]

Like an actual album (CD), I would rather have 1 CD than 12 individual CD's (for me, keeps things tidy). Say of those 12 tracks, I'm not keen on tracks 2, 3 and 5, I would like to be able to forward to the next track in sequence rather than pressing the fast forward button and guessing when the next track starts. I'm not saying that this is how it should be done or even if this is possible but I would find this feature useful.

[[Saint]]

My point is that there is nothing that you have described that can't be done already with the more conventional style of ripping albums to individual tracks.

If you have your library formatted in a sane way like most people do, it isn't untidy at all.

Music
-Artist
--Album
---Disc 1
----Track 1
----Track 2
----...
---Disc 2
----Track 1
----Track 2
----...

etc.

Or, you could use the Database, and even if you dump all your files in a single toplevel folder it will still sort them into a sane order by artist, album, year, etc. as long as you have correct metadata tags.


[Saint]

[monoid]

Like an actual album (CD), I would rather have 1 CD than 12 individual CD's (for me, keeps things tidy). ... I would like to be able to forward to the next track in sequence rather than pressing the fast forward button and guessing when the next track starts.

You could use cue sheets. So, that you would have 2 files for one CD. One file with music and one file describing name of songs, Interpret, lenght of song, ... (and many more...).

Using this setup, you could jump to the next/previous song. And have info about song name, artist name, ...

[Graham1]

My point is that there is nothing that you have described that can't be done already with the more conventional style of ripping albums to individual tracks.

If you have your library formatted in a sane way like most people do, it isn't untidy at all.

Music
-Artist
--Album
---Disc 1
----Track 1
----Track 2
----...
---Disc 2
----Track 1
----Track 2
----...

etc.

Or, you could use the Database, and even if you dump all your files in a single toplevel folder it will still sort them into a sane order by artist, album, year, etc. as long as you have correct metadata tags.

[Saint]

There is nothing wrong with the way you have formatted your library. In fact, mine is setup exactly the same (in both examples). It's just that I have come across a different way of storing tracks which I quite like but having (at the moment) difficulty skipping tracks.

[Graham1]

Like an actual album (CD), I would rather have 1 CD than 12 individual CD's (for me, keeps things tidy). ... I would like to be able to forward to the next track in sequence rather than pressing the fast forward button and guessing when the next track starts.

You could use cue sheets. So, that you would have 2 files for one CD. One file with music and one file describing name of songs, Interpret, lenght of song, ... (and many more...).

Using this setup, you could jump to the next/previous song. And have info about song name, artist name, ...

This sounds like what I'm after. I've not come across cue sheets before so I'll do some investigating. Thanks.