Re: [Usability] Sound Juicer 2 mockup comments

[Logan Rathbone <logan rathbone utoronto ca>]

On Sun, 09 Jan 2005 04:24:32 -0600
Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 16:52 +0100, Samuel Abels wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 15:37 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > > And there's no stop button in Totem, and I don't think there
> > > should be one in sound-juicer as a player. What would be the use?
> > 
> > The main use would be that it is closer to what people already know
> > from the real world.
> 
> First, I want to make it clear that, prior to software, pause and stop
> were defined in terms of the physical mechanism, not the behavior.  On
> both CDs and cassettes, "stop" is to stop spinning, turning, reading,
> and moving, and to reset the reading device.
> 
> For CDs, that means playing again starts from the beginning of the CD,
> not the last track.  For cassettes, that means playing again starts
> right where you left off, just like pause.  There was never a defined
> stop behavior, only a mechanism.
> 
I think you bring up an extremely good point.  You're absolutely right
-- there is no big black book that defines what a pause function should
do and what a stop button should do in the world of software... because
it's all derived from hardware in the first place!  It's silly if you
think about it.  In fact I think this whole stop/pause argument is all
quite silly.  But anyway...

> When we copied stop in software, not only was there not a well-defined
> behavior, but most software invented an entirely new behavior.  Stop
> has somehow morphed into a "start at the beginning of the track"
> behavior, which has absolutely no precedant in hardware devices.
>
This epitomizes why this argument is so silly!  Why should software
audio players carry along a function that only exists in hardware
devices because it makes sense for it to be there?  On software audio
players, you can interact with your music collection much more directly.
 The only time a pause _or_ a stop button would be needed is to stop the
sound without just muting the volume.  I don't see why there needs to be
two buttons that both basically carry out the same thing in a slightly
different way.
>
> Second, the only CD player I ever use is the one built into my car
> stereo.  It has no stop button.  QED.
> 
I think that's the only CD player a lot of people use nowadays ;-)