This might have been posted before, but I just remembered this when reading another post.

I was on a long drive with my girlfriend a couple of weeks ago, and she was browsing/queueing up songs to play. However about 2 or 3 times she accidentally, probably in the excitement of finding a specific tune, abruptly killed the current playlist (short press instead of long press + enqueue). This lead to a bit of an argument until I made the same mistake myself, sigh.

It would be really nice when selection of a song or playlist while browsing would use the same replace, insert, append, or enqueue behaviour as is used when selecting a song that was found as a result of a search.

However about 2 or 3 times she accidentally, probably in the excitement of finding a specific tune, abruptly killed the current playlist (short press instead of long press + enqueue). This lead to a bit of an argument until I made the same mistake myself, sigh.

I screwed myself 3 times that way today.

I do that a lot... doh!

Perhaps just reversing the short/long press functions would be sufficient, ie press to enqueue, hold to replace.

I figured making it identical to how it is done with search would probably most intuitive.

press, use the currently chosen 'insert mode'.
hold, show the menu with all possible alternatives.

Optionally use the selected menu item after a hold as the new insert mode so that you don't need to use a remote to change insert mode.

Intuitiveness helps...

but consider how most people use their empeg most of the time:
1) Play one specific playlist - album, artist, genre, whatever.
2) Down, Down, Down...(whole player)

Maybe I'm wrong, but starting from one track/playlist, and then enqueuing as the mood suits 'Jukebox mode', is probably not used anywhere near as much, so whatever change is made needs to take account of this and still allow switching between the 2 above scenarios easily.
Making it use the current search mode wouldn't work very well - the only way to have the 'easy playlists' is to leave search mode in 'replace', but when searching, it is most useful in either 'insert' or 'append'.
If both search and playlists had their own mode setting, then the scheme would work well.

As for mode switching without the remote, your other suggestion would work usability-wise, and IIRC be the same as the search functionality.

In an effort to avoid needless button mashing while i drive, I edited the ir_translate to interpret a hold of the search button to take me directly to the "insert" by track name screen. That skips the first three options that I never use and all I need to do is start entering the track name.

I like the idea that you could have a config.ini option (Also as a selectable option in the "Configure Player" screen in Emplode) along the lines of "Bring up insertion menu by default when selecting from the Playlists menu".

Dunno how to word the option, it should be re-worded much shorter than that. But I'd enjoy seeing that insert/append/enqueue/replace menu be there all the time by default, not just when I hold down the button.

Oh, and have its order be like I listed it above, with insert as the first default always.

Bu the default "out of the box" mode should be that it does what it does now.

I don't know, I think going into the insert/append/enque menu should be the default behavior. The current long-press is only there because it's a new feature, and it's compleetly unintuitive to someone who's never sat down at the empeg before. Also, as this thread has shown, most everyone who uses an empeg on a daily basis screws up fairly frequently when they mean to insert.

I'd propose that the logical way for it to work would be to have the menu come up by default, and a long press designate to automaticaly do the last selected insert/append/enque/play. This is gonna take more flash though, as the state is going to have to be saved. As a stop gap measure, I just want to change the default to enque...

Matthew

The current long-press is only there because it's a new feature,

No, it's there because when people pick something to play, they expect it to start playing. So the shortpress is still the default. Because new users will want to press the button and have it happen, not put up a cryptic menu with terms they don't understand. It's the correct UI design for the insert/append menu to be the "advanced" feature.

I just want to change the default to enque... (sic)

Am I the only one that sees the problem with this? An ever growing playlist?

Well, I (respectfully) disagree. Every time someone new gets in the car, they start making a playlist and halfway through it they erase it by accidentally not doing a long press, no matter how much I warn them about it. They then give up and go with the random shuffle, which isn't what they want, but it's easy. There are three other people in this thread saying they have the exact same problem... I don't see how a down press that used to mean play leading to a menu that says "play" as the first choice would be confusing at all...

I suspect this is somewhat a personal thing, as I always immediatly change winamp's default to enque, as I always want to build a playlist, but I still say the current method causes many people problems on a frequent basis.

Matthew

But when duplicates are stripped, it should never become larger than all songs on the player. I thought that if I enqueue things with after a search, that other occurences of that song are implicitly taken out of the existing playlist.

In fact, a regular jukebox typically doesn't allows the same song to appear more than once in the upcoming playlist. Probably to prevent someone (who is leaving a bar) from selecting the 20 minute version of freebird several times in a row and ruin the evening for everyone else.

But when duplicates are stripped, it should never become larger than all songs on the player.

Duplicate stripping is only performed when you re-shuffle, or when you select a fresh new playlist when in shuffle mode.

When you insert, it simply inserts (doing exactly what you told it to do) and doesn't perform the deduplication.

If you are in shuffle mode already, and you insert a playlist that contains duplicates, I don't know if it dedupes the inserted content or not. But I know it doesn't dedupe the whole current running order on an insert.

Yeah, but my point is that if the current default is simply changed to Enqueue, then there is *no* way of simply starting a fresh playlist. The only way to remove tracks from the current (ever-growing) playlist would be to use the tweak order buttons on the remote. So if you decided one day that you wanted to listen to just one album repetitively, then you'd have to tweak out every track on the album.

For a fully fledged 'search' type solution we discussed above, this isn't an issue.

if the current default is simply changed to Enqueue, then there is *no* way of simply starting a fresh playlist.

Right. But if the (optional) default were to display the insert/replace/append/enqueue menu on a short press, then there would be.

Yeah, we've got to assume that "play" is added to the enque/append/insert menu, as would only be logical.

Matthew

PS: Whoo hoo, i'm offically an addict. I want to that all the little people who helped me get to where I am today.

most everyone who uses an empeg on a daily basis screws up fairly frequently when they mean to insert.

Hey -- I resent that! I get it right at least three times out of every five that I try it!

tanstaafl.

Yeah, we've got to assume that "play" is added to the enque/append/insert menu, as would only be logical.

It already is, it's called "Replace".

In reply to:

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Every time someone new gets in the car, they start making a playlist and halfway through it they erase it by accidentally not doing a long press, no matter how much I warn them about it.

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Add my voice to this (I think I've asked for this feature myself in the past, anyway). Even my most frequent passengers (and, occasionally, myself - though I tend to leave the player on "random albums" most of the time) do this when they're thinking more about the music than the mechanics of operating the player - a good UI[*] shouldn't be a distraction from the task in hand.

I disagree with (Tony's?) assertion that "most people" use their players in an all-tracks-shuffled mode. I've no idea whether that's correct or not, but there are plenty of other useful ways to operate, and I'd certainly not inflict such an uncoordinated mix on any of my passengers even if I listened like that on my own.

An "undo" feature would also be incredibly useful. Even a single level that's lost on a reboot would allow for recovery from this sort of accident. At the moment, the running-order needs to be re-created from scratch.

[*] and in almost all respects the Empeg UI is excellent, without a doubt

An "undo" feature would also be incredibly useful.

Hugo and I were talking about this in the car a couple of weeks ago -- when I accidentally nuked his playlist by pressing Down one too many times.

Essentially, we thought that it'd be really easy to store the current running order in a reserved bookmark slot (not necessarily persisted), so that you could undo mistakes fairly easily.

Even the sensei aren't infallible