Yes, it’s time to rattle the tin cups across the jail bars!! I would say that restoring a previous functionality is logical.
The dark side of coding is that repairing one line can affect other routines, often in strange and unanticipated ways. Looking at the big picture, it’s a portable media player. Its function isn’t to be a tie tack , though a Clip does draw some attention when you walk into a meeting with the little guy mounted across your necktie. I can’t find the little P-38 and Ercoupe ones, hiding in a drawer somewhere.
Back to the point, what does it do are the four most important words to remember. No poofy “mission statement” required (I loathe those things). It handles a collection of music, book, and podcast files, and plays them back. Part and parcel of that mission is to have a method of selecting the files for playback. That’s why the thing has buttons and a display. Being able to play sequences of files is why things like Artist names and Albums exist.
When you select an Album, the player is essentially playing a playlist of album tracks, running through all tracks with the same album name. A playlist is a sequence of tracks that may, or may not, be from the same group. It makes wonderful sense to have a location where these playlists can be accessed, for if we didn’t have that, their only practical purpose would be to look at them using the computer. And this makes just about as much sense as starting at a recipe in hope of a tasty meal.
Playlists are a basic convenience of media interfaces and portable devices. Call me a little slow if you wish, but I have noticed that things like Windows Media Player have made a really big deal of incorporating playlists into the interface. Have any doubt? Open Windows Media Player and look what shows up right there in the upper left. In fact, right click on any one of them, and sending it to the target portable device is one click away.
One of the basic functions of a portable player is to be operable via user playlists. Thay’re a convenient way to group desired tracks and play them automatically. I can understand if this isn’t on the box, as delving beyond immediate features isn’t essential as a sales point. From a scientist’s point of inspection, box art is little more than the marketing equivalent of a bird’s pretty plumage, advertising for the purpose of survival of the species. You may not find the word playlists in the product description “bullet points”, indeed, but expecting the machine to understand playlists isn’t much of a stretch. Whether a duck understands water shouldn’t need definition.
Playlists are right here on my screen, page 16 for example, Clip Zip User Guide (August 2011 revision). The player needs to be able to navigate playlists from the user interface, and it is natural that this functionality should encompass the internal and external memories. The main limitation is that M3U lists must include path names.
Having playlists resident on the expansion memory (mounted microSD card) makes sense to me, as having lists that are directly related to the mounted card, also one that one can reasonably expect to be swapped in or out of current use, should be allowable on the card. It just makes sense, n’est-ce pas?
Bob :smileyvery-happy:
