>I don't know, but I _think_ the driving force behind the "touch to
>play" decision was the touch screen I/F for the SB Touch.
I think you're right.

>Having worked with these a bit I'm pretty convinced that the decision
>to have a "touch to play" behavior for Touch was the right one.
I'm not convinced.  Not everything can be touch to play, eg. can't touch to 
play an album, because then it is not easy to get to tracks.

Hierarchical "hyperlinked" local music browsing was always one of the plus 
points of the Squeezebox Server.  artist, album, genre, year are not touch to 
play, because you need to be able to navigate into those items.

The contention is really only about the behaviour for songs.  Opinion seems to 
be divided on this.  Perhaps its due to familiarity with other devices (old 
classic squeezebox players, iPods, etc) that causes the divide.

One of the issues is with unintentionally playing a track, wiping the current 
playlist.  The developers say that the device cannot be shipped without 
implementing a solution to that, and several suggestions were made:
1. Playlist/party mode, such that play doesn't play but adds to playlist 
instead.
2. "Are you sure you want to play this?" confirmation dialogs.
3. Some kind of undo/history facility.

Not sure what the final behaviour will be.

>You only have one "quick" selection option on a touch screen and you've got to
>use that for the use case most people will need most of the time.
>
I understand that some users will want to play tracks a lot of the time (and 
now by default, playing a song will play the album, starting from the chosen 
song), but I don't generally do that.  I play albums from the beginning, or 
play random music, I don't really play a single song, or play the album at the 
chosen song.

What I do like is to browse the song details, eg. for navigating to related 
music, to see information, to do some other action (start a mix, etc).

I may play an album (one play action), and then want to see details for several 
songs on that album.

Maybe it isn't so bad for browsing music, but then there's the current playlist 
- the default action is play there too.  So if you right-arrow on an IR for a 
Touch on the currently playing track, it restarts the track, rather than 
showing the track details.  That is the hardest thing to swallow.

>The decision which is debatable here is the one to value CONSISTENCY so
>high, that even the old interfaces (having dedicated play buttons) which
>would not have needed that behavior, adopt it anyhow. I believe for the
>IR remote it's the wrong choice.
>
Definitely not right for the IR remote, especially seeing the same remote can 
be used on Touch and classic players, but they have different behaviours.
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