From: James Teh <jamie_at_jantrid.net>
Date: Tue, 09 May 2006 08:34:20 +1000

Hi.
I do not have an Ipod, so have no idea how the Rockbox port works on the
Ipod. However, it seems to me that you are saying there is no 'stop'
button to stop the music, rather than just using 'play' to pause. If you
'stop' the music, the voice UI will talk as normal. It is not currently
possible for Rockbox to speak while playback is paused; it is not just
related to the volume of the audio. To cut a long story short,
currently, there needs to be audio with which to mix the voice while
playback is in progress. When paused, the audio must remain in the
buffer in order to facilitate immediate playback, but there is no new
audio with which to mix the voice, so voice cannot occur. This is my
understanding anyway; one of the devs is very welcome to correct my
probably flawed explanation. :) A few solutions have been discussed, but
they're not likely to be implemented for a while yet.

If you can 'stop' playback on the Ipod with Rockbox rather than pausing,
do this instead and voice should work. Pressing play again should resume
the audio, but it won't be quite as immediate as when unpausing.

Jamie

Mark wrote:
> I'm using RB on an iPod Nano, and it certainly seems to be getting
> better! thanks.
>
> One thing that does seem a bit annoying is that when I use the Play
> button to stop (pause) the music, with "Fade on pause" set to On, the
> music fades out OK, but the spoken UI voice volume fades out too. This
> also happens if the "Fade on pause" is off.
> If I press Play again to listen to the UI, then the music starts again
> (not suprising!)
> So, as it stands, if I have music playing and I want to stop the music
> but still be able to listen to the voice, I have to do a hard reset
> (menu+Select).
>
> This is not really too much trouble, but it does seem a bit over-the-top.
>
> This all happens, I suspect, because the volume level of the voice is
> linked directly to the volume of the music. What I'd like to suggest is
> the de-coupling of the voice volume and the music volume. That way when
> I stop/pause the music the voice would still be audible.
>
> There could be an extra setting under the Voice menu, for voice volume.
> This could either be a straightforward db value, or it could have two
> further settings: "Voice Volume Link" and "Voice Volume level".
> The "Voice Volume Link" would have two settings:
> relative - with this set, the volume at which the voice is spoken is
> relative to the volume of the music so that if the music is playing
> quietly then the voice will speak relatively quietly and if the music is
> playing loudly then the voice would be louder too.
> absolute - the voice volume is set at a particular level regardless of
> how loud the music is playing. In this way, the volumes are completely
> independent.
>
> If the firmware/hardware are configured in such a way that having these
> two channel volumes separated is not easily practical, then one other
> suggestion would be that when the player volume reaches zero (or minimum
> value) at the end of the pause, then the volume is immediately reset to
> its pre-fade value (with the music remaining paused).
>
> As I said, having to reset the player is not really a big problem, just
> that it's, well, just not very "elegant". If it'd be a huge job to
> implement this, then I'll happily carry on resetting!
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mark
>

-- 
James Teh
Email: jamie_at_jantrid.net
WWW: http://www.jantrid.net/jamie/
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Yahoo: jcs_teh

Received on 2006-05-09