Hi!
So I’ve set my dad the audiophile up with Volumio and he’s loving it. But one that that is confusing him is the queue, which I’m not so much a fan of myself. I find it odd that there is no consume, that once in the queue things linger there forever. It is also not analogous to how one uses CDs. For him, he ends up with a clogged up queue and having to individually play tracks of a album rather than setting it and forgetting it.
What I’d like…
If a user starts at track 1 of a CD, it should play the whole album. If a user starts at track 4, it should play the rest of the album starting at track 4. Anything previously in the queue should be removed. The user shouldn’t really even need to know of the existence of the queue, in my opinion and my use case at least.
What I would change is this… “Play Button” becomes “Clear Queue and Add Tracks n to N to Queue Button”.
I’ve been digging through the UI, and it’s mostly above my head, but I’m thinking I could modify the code that adds a whole album to the queue to accomplish this. Any suggestions or thoughts appreciated. Thanks!
I agree that a consume mode is desirable (& a common mode of play that is met elsewhere on other devices). There was actually such a mode in Volumio some time ago, but it proved problematical to get it to work correctly. I can’t remember the reasons why, but you could do some digging back through the forums.
Yea consume is helpful, but even that doesn’t make the experience analogous to a CD or other streaming apps. The queue is an odd technical middle man that I think it doesn’t make sense for a user to be aware of unless someones goal is to build a playlist.
In regular use, a user just wants to click a song and have it automatically continue to play subsequent songs until the end of the list of songs they are browsing. This is how other apps work, and how Records, CDs, and Cassettes work. The queue could be a technical necessity to implement this but I don’t see why a user should have to be aware of it and have to manage it.
I think this method could be implemented without consume. We are already able to “Add song to queue and clear other songs in the queue”. We are also able to “Add entire album to queue”. If we combined those two functions, and allowed it to add the whole album track X to track N. That would work exactly as described. The queue should be rebuilt from scratch whenever there is any user input. Now the queue would operate just like a CD, be predictable, and I’d never have to look at it. So the tab could be removed.