I'm posting this in praise of the Random Play plug-in (thanks kdf!). I figured that beginners might not know about it so that's why I'm posting in the General section. This plug-in *really* should be made part of the standard installation.
Here's a story that reflects why I feel this way: I've owned an ipod for about three years. Previously, setting up the ipod to listen to random songs was a bit of a pain. First you had to go into the Settings and change to the shuffle songs mode, then you had to go to and play "All" songs and it would then shuffle your entire set of songs (much like the way Squeezebox does it). But it was a pain. And non-technical folks (like my wife) could never get it right. She would get confused on what setting to change or after she was done, she'd accidentally leave it on Shuffle, so then everything played randomly. Then Apple did something very smart: a few months back, they added a new top-level command called "Shuffle Songs." You just click one button and it starts spitting out songs randomly. And it doesn't affect any other settings. Brilliant. Now my wife (and I) use this feature all the time. Previously, the Squeezebox had the same problem. There was no way my wife was going to learn all the steps to play all the songs randomly on the Squeezebox. Plus, it took a really long time to create the playlist and sometimes the machine would timeout because I have a lot of songs. Ugh.... So this new Random Play plug-in is just wonderful. Very simple and easy to use. Works instantly. I have moved it to the top-level menu and use it all the time. I think that as more and more "regular" people (e.g. non techies) start to buy and use the Squeezebox it is important that we have easy-to-use commands for basic stuff like listening to songs randomly. But if it remains a third-party plug-in, many users will never know about it. That's why I suggest making it part of the core product. Just my 2 cents worth. And thanks again to kdf for writing that plug-in! Brett -- BBobley _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
