From: Martin Borus <martin_at_borus.de>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 09:04:45 +0200

Hi,

I joined the mailing list to comment on a mail by Nate Nystrom on
the change of the fast forward behaviour.

In version 1.3 is it possible to set a fixed amount of seconds
for fast forwarding steps. This has been changed in favor of
an a forwarding that gets faster the longer you use it.

Nate wrote:
> we should probably combine the ff_rewind and
> ff_rewind_accel bytes into one
> byte. With acceleration, an ff/rewind step size
> above, say, 15 seconds seems pretty useless to me.

 
When I fount the feature I set it to 30 seconds right away and found
it to be the killer feature why I *had* to change to RockBox.

Here's the reason:

I use my Archos to time-shift my favorite radio stations to listen to
it in the car and some other places. This means I usually have files
that are from 3 - 8 hours long in which navigation is a pain.

With a fixed step of 30 seconds I can skip a song, news or
commercials in less then a second. These skips are on average 3:30
minutes, the length of a typical song.

With the new behavior it takes 5 seconds at the fastest setting. This
is only a minor annoyance. The problem is a different one:

Now I have to look at the display while forwarding, because if I hold
the key for 4 seconds a don't get very far, but if I hold it for 6
seconds, I forward for 8 minutes. So blind navigation within the file
is no longer possible. This is a major downside for in car use.

I hope I can convince you to put the old feature back in - maybe as a
combination. A fixed forwarding size and the acceleration factor as
two values would provide a flexible navigation for everbodies needs.

Regards,
Martin
Received on 2002-08-31