I’ve written recently about the problems with my iPod Classics, and how I had selected a backup solution on my Android Device using iSyncr and Rocket Player. As I’ve been using the apps — especially Rocket Player — more, I’ve encountered a few hiccups. Some are clear bugs (which I am reporting), some I’m still exploring to determine if they are bugs, and some fall into the category of enhancement requests. The purpose of this post is to keep track of what I’ve reported; I plan to ✔ when something has been fixed or an enhancement made. 🆕 indicates items added in subsequent updates.
I’m still hoping to figure out the reason why the iPods have been acting up and fix it. But I know that one of these days, the 10 year old hardware will die, or I will exceed the internal database size. So I need a good backup solution (which, until I recover things, is right now my primary solution). Rocket Player is about 90-95% there. I want to help them get the rest of the way to being perfect.
Confirmed Bug List
- When a Live List playlist gets empty, it refills as the entire media library, modulo excluded genres. Tested with a playlist of “(plays = 0) & (a number of excluded genres)”
- When a Live List playlist is sorted by album, for multi-CD sets, it sorts the album by track increasing, and then disk decreasing, giving (disk,track): 2,1; 1,1; 2,2; 2,1; …
- When a Live List playlist has a predicate that results in songs being removed from the list after being played (such as the playlist I have for songs where “(plays > 0) & (last played > 730 days)”, when you set a song for repeat-1 and the list is on shuffle, it plays the song a second time displaying the art for the next song in the live live shuffle, and then instead of the third playing, it plays the song that would have been next in the shuffle while displaying the album art for the song after that. In other words, suppose the shuffle order is A, B, C, D, E. Here’s what’s happens: A, B (press repeat-1), B (displaying art for C), C (displaying art for D, even though repeat-1 is still on), … . Further, when you stop it a few seconds into C, it has already marked C as played.
Tentative Bug List
Note: On these, I think I’ve seen a problem, but I haven’t been able to consistently repeat it. So these might not be a problem after all until I play with it a bit more.
- There may be a bug where the first song in a Live List that updates based on last played date does not get updated.
- There may be a bug where the Rocket Player lock screen does not prompt for PIN or fingerprint to unlock after sliding the slider.
Enhancement List
- Support for “Skip When Shuffling”
- Splitting the global “Stop after Each Song” flag into two flags: one for music, and one for podcasts.
- Add the ability for Live Lists to test on track length, and to sort by track length.
- Improved predicate language for Live Lists in order to support constructs like: “A & B & (C | D | E) & F”
- Having Live Lists show a count of how many songs on the list have been played.
- Having an option to display the time left in a song, vs. the total track length, when a song is playing
- Having the ability to go back and replay the last song played, even in live lists that remove the song from the list after playing.
- Having the ability to delete a single rule in a Live Live, vs having to clear the list and start over.
- Having new string tests in Live Lists, such as “Starts with”. A full regular expression tester would be even better, but ….
- Adding a test for “is not” for numeric comparisons (right now, there’s only =, <, and >).
- Improved speed in scanning for new songs, when coming into Live Lists, when displaying artists, etc. In general: the program needs to be much faster when dealing with extremely large libraries (e.g., over 40,000 songs).
