I'm starting to add more and more podcasts to SC recently, and the recent addition of better fast forward/rewind handling recently have really improved the user experience for them.
Having said that, I still think there is lots of room for potential improvement in a few specific areas. _1._\"Played_podcast\"_memory._ Podcasts aren't designed to be played in the same way as music. You don't listen to a song one day, then think "damn - I've already heard that one" if you chose it in a weeks time. Podcasts are very different though. For each podcast, it is rare that you'd want to hear the same episode a second time. I suggest that when you select a podcast, the normal requirement is "have any new episodes been released since the last one I listened to?" It isn't too bad if you're in the habit of catching up with a podcast each week (assuming that's how often it is released), as you just choose the top one and play it. If you aren't that disciplined (or don't always have the time) though, there is no easy way to continue from where you left off. One of the recent podcasts I have discovered has over 60 episodes, and I'm gradually working my way through them only slightly faster than they're being released. This generally requires much trial and error before working out which one is next. I've even started noting down where I'm up to on bits of paper, but this seems really wrong :-). I guess the starting point in improving this situation would be to define what is meant by a "played" episode. I'd suggest that maybe it could be if the last minute/10% of the episode has been played. Come to think of it, I think Slimscrobbler must have similar functionality to decide when a track has been played enough to upload the details. The second part would be to decide how to deliver/display the episodes in a way that uses this information. I suggest maybe an additional menu level that has menus of something like "Played", "Not Played" and "All". Does that sound reasonable/feasible? _2._Start/end_point_memory._ May podcasts are pretty long. A few of mine are an hour in length, and I don't always get the chance to listen to all of an episode in one go. It would be great if the "played up to" position could be remembered. A "resume last episode" option would be needed to make use of this. This is somewhat less important to me than the "played" memory (and I can understand it might be trickier to code), but it would still be useful. _3._Podcast_Sync._ It is great how songs can now sync mid track without restarting. It would be fantastic if this could happen with podcast episodes as well. I'd actually suggest it is more important for podcasts. It isn't a massive deal to restart a 3 minute song, but that's a pain for an hour podcast! I feel a bit bad about all these requests, as I'm certainly not a good enough coder to be able to do any of this stuff myself. I would be more than happy to help spec/test any attempts though! I'll leave this here to see what people's thoughts are. It might even be the case that some of this stuff is already possible and I just need to be educated! Maybe some of this stuff is already planned for future releases.... Assuming that this stuff doesn't exist and isn't being actively worked on, I'll log a feature request and try to put a bit more meat in it as well..... -- SadGamerGeek ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SadGamerGeek's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6145 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=52098 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
