From: Jeff Goode <jeffg7_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:24:38 -0500

pondlife wrote:
> Hi Jeff,
>
> Thanks for the refactoring - playback might even get to the point where it's
> easy to understand if you carry on like this! ;-)
>
> I always use crossfade. Shuffle and Manual Skip is my settting of choice.
> This means that:natural track transitions when not shuffling will play
> without crossfade (i.e. play an album as the artist intended gaplessly), but
> all other cases will crossfade, for smooth transition when manually skipping
> or allowing shuffle to do its evil work.
>
> I've not tried a very recent build, but it's definitely a case of shuffle OR
> manual track skip, not AND. (I rarely use shuffle to be honest.)
>
> I don't personally see much use for the new option, i.e. I don't see when
> you'd use "Auto Track Skip" but not "Always" instead.
>
> (Having tried "Always" it rarely sounds better than the original flow anyway
> for natural track transitions, but that depends entirely on the playlist -
> some auto-generated and all shuffled playlists ought to be treated as if
> shuffle is enabled, but I can't think of a nice way to achieve that, so I
> put the option in my quickscreen instead.)
>
> As others have said, I think we should rename "Auto Track Skip" to be
> "Natural Track Change" or similar (assuming we keep it in...)
>
> Hope this helps,
> pondlife
>
>
Looking at the original crossfade logic, it would act as you describe
using Shuffle and Manual Skip, but the manual seemed to describe it
differently. So I used the AND logic when rewriting the decision tree.
I'll fix it back to an OR decision and rewrite the manual to make it
clear what's going on. Maybe the option ought to be "Shuffle Or Manual
Skip", which seems closer to me what's going on.

The new "Auto Track Skip" option was put in on request, so I'd like to
keep it. And if I were using crossfade I'd probably use it the most.
(Since I mostly listen to gapless albums, I don't use crossfade, though
it would work great for compilations). The idea here is to crossfade
for all track end situations, radio station style, but if you want to
skip a song, it happens right away without crossfading. "This song
sucks... NEXT!"

Speaking of manual skips, I noticed that crossfaded manual skips are
handled precisely the same way as track-end crossfades. That is, the
fadeout happens *at the end* of the currently buffered material, which
is then mixed with the faded in new track. This means that even after
the skip button is pressed it can be a couple of seconds before the
crossfade start sample is marked and the fade out delay begins to count
down. I propose that the fadeout delay counter should begin immediately
for crossfaded manual skips. I don't foresee any objections to this,
but I thought I'd ask.

I'm still torn on the "Auto Track Skip" verbiage. I tried to make it
clear what it is in the manual, but it's not very descriptive. Even
something like "Natural Track Change" doesn't quite nail it. "Track End
Only" maybe?

Jeff
Received on 2009-11-12