Re: Recovering playback state of multiple playlists and over multiple sessions

[Yuchen Pei]

Yoni Rabkin <yoni@rabkins.net> writes:

> Yuchen Pei <hi@ypei.me> writes:
>
> > Yoni Rabkin <yoni@rabkins.net> writes:
> >
> > > Yuchen Pei <hi@ypei.me> writes:
> > >
> > > > Hello,
> > > >
> > > > I often have several long playlists of spoken words, mostly
> > > > conference
> > > > talks and lectures, and I wonder how I can resume where I 
> > > > left from
> > > > last time.  I have them all saved in native playlist files, 
> > > > and
> > > > load
> > > > them manually when I start an emacs session.
> > > >
> > > > There are two problems:
> > > >
> > > > 1. Say I have two playlists A and B, A is at track 42 at 
> > > > 23:00 and
> > > > B
> > > > is at track 73 at 87:32.  I just paused track 42 of A and 
> > > > would
> > > > like
> > > > to resume track 73 of B.  How do I do that?  If I navigate to 
> > > > B and
> > > > press RET (emms-playlist-mode-play-smart) or invoke
> > > > (emms-playlist-mode-play-current-track), track 73 will start 
> > > > from 
> > > > the beginning, rather than 87:32.  If I navigate to B and 
> > > > press P,
> > > > track 42 of A will resume.  I also tried switching to 
> > > > playlist B 
> > > > at the metaplaylist first, but that did not seem to help 
> > > > either.
> > > >
> > > > 2. Say I have one playlist A at track 42 at 23:00.  How do I 
> > > > save
> > > > it,
> > > > close emacs and resume at track 42 at 23:00 next time I open 
> > > > emacs
> > > > and
> > > > load the playlist?  I tried saving the playlist as a native
> > > > playlist,
> > > > but when I load it starts from track 1 again.
> > >
> > > `emms-bookmarks' has code to support this, but it isn't 
> > > extensively
> > > developed because this is an edge case and doesn't come up 
> > > very
> > > often. I
> > > have used `emms-bookmarks' in the (far) past and I remember it
> > > working
> > > well enough at the time.
> >
> > Thanks for the pointer.
> >
> > As I understand it emms-bookmarks's goal is to restore the 
> > playback
> > position in a media file, but not to restore to the item in a 
> > playlist
> > across emacs sessions (my second problem).  I tried 
> > emms-bookmark-add
> > on an item, switched to another playlist and played something 
> > there,
> > and came back to the item, and did emms-bookmark-next.  It 
> > didn't
> > restore the position.  I'll have to look more into it.
>
> The bookmark data is stored natively as part of the track, so it 
> would
> be written to disk in a emms-playlist-save, and equally read 
> back of
> course.
>
> I don't save emacs sessions generally speaking (desktop-save and 
> etc.),
> so I can't speak to if the existing emacs packages for saving 
> buffers
> and restoring them would also do what you want for Emms. Emms 
> playlists
> are just buffers with "propertized" text after all, so those 
> solutions
> should work (in theory; famous last words).
>
> So the answer would require first knowing how you manage saving 
> and
> restoring sessions in Emacs "grosso modo" and then find out how 
> Emms
> fits into that.

I don't really save or restore emacs sessions.  This is because I 
have an emacsclient on all the time until an untimely death 
because something goes terribly wrong, and if I make it revive 
from that state I fear it could go into a death loop.  This is why 
I would rather have an emms-specific feature for this.

> > > One of my uses for Emms is to watch video's stored on my disk, 
> > > and
> > > many of them are very long (6 or 4 hour endurance races). In 
> > > that
> > > case I use the mpv backend with its save-position-on-quit 
> > > option, so
> > > both saving and continuation is handled outside of Emms.
> >
> > I tried save-position-on-quit - it doesn't seem to work on 
> > streams
> > over https and ssh, which are the only things I play with emms 
> > these days...
> >
> > This also does not address the second problem.  I guess I'll 
> > have to
> > hack out something myself.
> >
> > Do you think restoring to an item in a playlist across emacs 
> > sessions
> > is also an edge case?
>
> See above, and we'll discuss it from there.


--
Best,
Yuchen

PGP Key: 47F9 D050 1E11 8879 9040  4941 2126 7E93 EF86 DFD0
          <https://ypei.me/assets/ypei-pubkey.txt>

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature