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[lalittle]

I just noticed a change in Theater View playback paradigm that has a pretty big negative effect on my use.

When I navigate to an album, select a song, and hit "Play," ONLY that single song is added to Playing Now.  I REALLY preferred the previous behavior where ALL the songs SHOWING (which was typically an album in my case) would be added to the Playing Now list, while the one that was actually hi-lighted started playing.  This was intuitive, logical behavior that mimicked both the behavior of the standard view, and the behavior of CD players, where the rest of the CD will finish playing starting from song you chose.

In other words, with standard view, you use the panes to navigate to a Genre/Artist/Album, then select a song to play.  ALL the songs in the song display are added to the Playing Now list, including the ones before the one you selected.  This is the same as the excepted, standard behavior of CD players, where all the songs of the current CD are added to the "list" of songs that will play.  This means having the rest of the CD play from this point on, and you'll be able to go to both "Previous" and "Next" songs, INCLUDING the ones that came before the one you started playing.

In the current Theater View implementation, however, these standards are broken, and ease of use is impaired for "typical" situations.  ONLY the single song you selected plays -- you cannot use the "previous" or "next" controls to move forward or back a track, and when this song is finished, playback stops.  Some people might respond to this saying that you can "select" an album from the previous page and "play" it, but 1) this breaks the standard conventions that are already established, and 2) functionality is limited.

For example, if you want to play an album, you need to STOP at the "album" page (without going to the song list for that album) and hit "enter," then scroll down one item to "play" and select it.  Simply navigating to the first track of the song list was MUCH easier and more intuitive, and "felt" better from a navigational standpoint.  It is intuitive to play the first song on an album and expect the album to continue from this point.  To make matters worse, if you want to play the last half of an album, (or the last two songs, etc.) you now have to go through the process of individually "adding" these tracks to a playlist, which is vastly less friendly than simply clicking on the first song you want to hear and letting the rest of the album play through to the end.

I hope it will be possible to return the previous behavior in this particular area.  I honestly think that it was much more "usable" before.  The current implementation adds a decent amount of extra work to the process of simple playback, and offers little to no advantages that I can see.

Thanks for any feedback on this,

Larry

[raym]

When I navigate to an album, select a song, and hit "Play," ONLY that single song is added to Playing Now. 

No need to panic. I'm sure it was just an oversight. Matt has been experimenting with this behaviour for a few days and it's obviously not yet finished. Last thing he proposed was to make this Play behaviour optional (like Standard View's double click behaviour setting) which is both a fantastic idea and what many here have been suggesting for ages

More info here:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=40728.msg278018#msg278018

Cheers,
Ralf.

[jmone]

I'm with Ralf - It looks like a bug where the "PLAY" and "ADD TO PLAYING NOW" from the MENU seem to do the same thing - AS it works PERFECTLY using the RC Play button in that, eg if I press the RC Play Button :
1) On a highlighted Album (or group of Albums) all Songs from that Album (or group or Albums) are added to Playing Now starting with the first track and progressing through the list.
2) On a highlighted Song all Songs from the Album are added to Playing Now starting with the track highlighted and progressing through the list.

Thanks
Nathan

[lalittle]

No need to panic. I'm sure it was just an oversight.

Thanks -- I was afraid that I missed out on some discussion of this and that the paradigm had been changed.  It's good to know that this was not the case.

Larry

[Osho]

No need to panic.

I am already in panic mode with the change of Enter in the Thumbnail theater view mode . This change is coming close to pushing me over to maniac! The only thing keeping me sane are all the wonderful new changes to theater view 

Osho

[park]

I like the way it is now personally. The "play all" might work when you are looking at an album of songs, but it's horrible for videos.  And if you are not at the files level, but at the artists level, the "Play all" method is havoc.
I guess we'll all be happy though, since the right click menu remembers your last selection, so if they put "Play all" in the "more" section, it will only need selecting once to become your default method.

[raym]

I like the way it is now personally.

Ah, but so do I. Unfortunately, others hate this behaviour with a passion hence the need for a better solution...

...since the right click menu remembers your last selection, so if they put "Play all" in the "more" section, it will only need selecting once to become your default method.

Was this menu feature removed in 244 though?? I'll have to re-check. Anyway, I didn't like it at first but really think it's a great idea now. It provides a way of customising the menu to do what you want and as you want it. I think this is even better than offering a seperate PLAY behavioural option because you can set this up as you please while remaining in Theater View!!

Having this feature would allow me to setup the menu with ADD on top. Ie:

ADD
PLAY
MORE
...
...
CANCEL

This would solve many issues for me and others who build playlists on the fly. As it stands today, it's far too easy to loose your playlist by hitting enter twice by mistake (and therefore replacing playing now).

Anyway. There's many ways to skin a cat. This was one solution alluded to a few days ago by JR and one I think might just work!

[glynor]

I like the way it is now personally. The "play all" might work when you are looking at an album of songs, but it's horrible for videos.

See... I'm just the opposite.  I'm currently completely unable to use Theater View for Video because this was changed.  Using Play All for Video is very important for me.  Yet another reason that we just need an option.  It's just something that different people see differently.

To give two examples of why it's unusable currently (for me) for Video:

Back in the day I used to convert movies from DVD or recordings to MPEG-4 ASP and then burn them onto CD, I split my movies into 2-3 700MB hunks.  Even though I no longer do this (the price of DVD-Rs has come down so I now burn 3-4 movies to a DVD-R disc and keep them all in one piece), I still have a LARGE back catalog of  videos where they are split into multiple pieces.  When I want to play one of these movies, I generally open my "Movies" View Scheme in Theater View (which basically just lists all the movies and lets me sub-filter them by Genre and Director), scroll down the list until I find the first piece of the movie, and hit OK.  Before, this worked perfectly.  Since it "Played All" (which is what I have my double-click option set to), it automatically continued to the next hunk of the movie as soon as the first piece ended.  Now, it just stops playing part way through the movie.  To get it to work as it is now, I have to play the first piece, pause it, go back to the list and find the next piece, select it and go to More --> Add (as next to play).  This is obviously unworkable.

For another example, when I watch my large catalog of TV Shows, I generally like to watch the episodes in order.  So, I go in and I scroll through the list until I find the first unwatched episode (note: not the first episode of the Season, the first one that I didn't watch already on a different day) and I play it.  This worked nicely because when that episode was over, it'd automatically start the next episode in order (and so on and so forth) and I could just continue with my Lost or CSI or whatever marathon until I got sick of it and turned it off.  As is now, it just stops after it finishes playing the first episode and then makes you manually go in and pick the next one if you want to keep going.  A lot of work for no gain for me...

I'm curious though... Why do you want it to only play the one file for videos?  Is it that annoying if it continues to the next video in the list after a movie is over?  I usually hit stop during the credits anyhow, so that rarely happens (and when it does, I just hit stop then).  I just wonder how it bothers you for video when it works this way...

[raym]

I'm curious though... Why do you want it to only play the one file for videos?  Is it that annoying if it continues to the next video in the list after a movie is over? 

Yes, because none of my videos are split like yours and I don't watch them like you've described

Seriously though. I understand your argument. I always have. For me, the issue is not so much with Video but with Audio. When I hit "Play" on a selected song, I don't wanna Add the whole Album to Playing Now! If I wanted to do that, I would have chosen Play at the Album level. This has never made sense to me. Yes, I could choose ADD but you could also hit Ctrl+P to solve your current problem 

No need debating this over again.... A play option for Theater View or something like the last used menu item idea proposed above is in order.