Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] UI for selecting a play order?



On Tue, 2004-03-09 at 22:20, Jeffrey Yasskin wrote:

> I don't like that option because then the two checkboxes aren't
> orthogonal. 

If we were actually out to specify playback order formally, yes.

>  Shuffle guarantees that you'll hear every song
> before you hear the same song again, but as soon as you check repeat,
> you can hear the same song pretty soon later. I think that'd confuse me.

And that's also true right now.  If you have shuffle + repeat checked,
it could happen that the last song chosen in the shuffle order is second
in the next shuffle loop.  The current behavior just makes it less
likely to happen (directly proportional to how many songs there are).

Let me put this another way.  My feeling is most people who check both
shuffle+repeat are really thinking something like "I want to listen to
this music out of order forever".  

I don't think most people are really thinking  "I want to listen to each
displayed song exactly once out of order, then again in some other
order, forever".  

I should probably admit at this point that my perspective here may be
biased, because I have honestly never really used either shuffle or
repeat since even before I started hacking on Rhythmbox more than a year
ago, other than to test them once after reimplementing them the first
time when converting from RBView to RBSource and then once after you
fixed Shuffle.  That's something like 30 seconds every 6 months so far
:)

So if there's anyone here who actually uses shuffle+repeat together,
please speak up!

> This also doesn't let people pick their preferred play order if it's not
> shuffle, linear, or random-by-age-and-rating.

Right, but the other play orders are variations on random, and I still
feel we should try really hard to pick a random mode that's just
"right".  Your play order abstraction does give us (and end users) an
easy way to experiment though, which is cool.

> I like the idea to make the behavior of the shuffle checkbox a
> preference. I'm pretty sure that once someone picks it they won't change
> it often if at all, so the full list doesn't belong on the main screen.

I agree.  But we win doubly if there's no need for changing the main UI
or adding a preference.

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