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aargirakis / BZRPlayer

Audio player for Windows that plays over 650 different fileformats
http://bzrplayer.blazer.nu/
GNU General Public License v3.0
8 stars 0 forks source link

the endless loop of unplayable tracklist entreies should be perceived by the user #463

Open ciros88 opened 9 months ago

ciros88 commented 9 months ago

having the behavior described in this ticket #317, here an unpleasant scenario: 2023-10-06 19-27-03.zip

the problem here is that the user doesn't perceive that there is an endless loop in progress that tries to play something,, because the playback button isn't rendered as "pause" but as "play" as the same as when the player is stopped. before start to think how to fix #317 we can enhance the actual behavior simply showing an endless change of play button from pause to play (that quickly switches) until the user press the stop button. in this manner the user will be aware of this endless loop, and he will stop it. so he can also rename or move his files avoiding having a playback starting itself without any user input (this also scared me when did it happen the first time and i was in completely silence alone in my room lol)

ciros88 commented 8 months ago

another thing we can add to makes the user perceives the ongoing loop is change the track color to green when loading is starts not when playback starts (so green meaning will be: trying to play or playing). and then change the color again when tracks become invalid. in this manner the user will see a quick switch from (the starting) white to green then grey then green and grey again (for a single looped track entry) or a 'color scroll down' (for multiple track entires) and so knows something is going on and stops it. this seems more simple and quick to implement

this is inspired by the winamp behaviour (obviosuly colors are different): 2023-10-24 10-57-01.zip

as u see in the video, winamp also has the green and red little squares that have the same function as i've proposed in first comment:

we can enhance the actual behavior simply showing an endless change of play button from pause to play (that quickly switches) until the user press the stop button. in this manner the user will be aware of this endless loop, and he will stop it

aargirakis commented 7 months ago

Isn't it enough that the cursor is following the loading track and the play button flashes? I'm not sure adding green or other color will change that much.

ciros88 commented 7 months ago

it is not something really needed in beta anymore as we already have now the play button flashes (so u can remove it from beta milestone if you want),
but think about having only 2 track entries or single one: the scrolling bar will not appear. also not everybody have the player control window enabled: when you launch a playlist then u need only to use a shortcut for play, pause, stop, and next/previous track. no need to have player control window opened, so u will not see that button flashes. apart of these considerations, it is about consistency of the internal states: the entry color should reflect the internal player state, so it will be green when the playback mechanism is going to start (loading+playing, as the button switches to play symbol), but then it will become grey because marked as invalid. so the user really know what is going on