The issue here is that if you’re typing to jump to an artist, you end up hitting space bar and pausing the music.
It’s happened to me and its not a great experience. On the other hand, this isn’t search and making sure behaves consistently seemed like the right choice.
Someone mentioned this to me 4 days ago, and I responded:
Tough design decision… Scary to suddenly make the spacebar not pause, especially if the letter typed was accidental… We ignore ‘The’ and ‘A’, so jumping to a 2nd word should be pretty rare… and i have an idea for a more lightweight filtering feature that might be good here… Think I’m ok with this one.
A second person mentioned it yesterday and it just happened to me again, so I’m putting this here for discussion. Thoughts?
I’ve been caught a few times with this one, but, mainly when I forget which PC I am using (KVM switch). I reckon that I benefit from instant pause (e.g. when the phone rings) more than the downside of accidental pausing.
How about this?
Once the first key is typed and Roon displays the search box, disable the space bar pause function, then when the dialogue closes revert to space-pause.
Yeah, I think the issue is the ‘phone call’ use case.
Say the phone rings and you try to hit to pause the music. If you miss and hit a letter, now you’re in AlphaNav mode and have to wait a second or two for the feedback panel to dismiss. You could be hitting space over and over trying to pause, and nothing’s happening…
I’ve hit space when trying to jump, and it’s definitly annoying if the music pauses when you don’t want it to, but I feel like the opposite is way worse, and space should always be consisent.
The more I navigate around the full collection I have the more I feel I need the space bar to be a space character and not a play/pause short-cut.
If I want to get to an artist quickly then without a space bar I can only go as far as the first name. For artists that share a common first name this is quite a poor experience as I now have to type and then scroll…in some cases a lot of scrolling
I want to type Bob Dy…; John Le; Paul S; Peter G etc so I quickly get to the place I want to be. I have page after page of Johns and Pauls !!
I am actually getting a bit frustrated by the lack of space on the quick search.
If the use-case is only the emergency phone call to Pause then how about use the Esc key as this is possibly intuitively more correct.
I think when in artist or album view and the overlay comes up after typing your first letter, space bar should map back to a space until the user hits enter or the overlay times out and does it’s thing.
I learned a trick the other day that may help here:
Type / (a slash) to get the Focus search function. You can then type a space without pausing the music!
I.e.: “bob d” will pause but “/bob d” will not. OK, you get the Focus window which is a bit annoying but other than that it works great! (An improvement of the user interface would be to accept the slash and not bring up the Focus pane…)
I think it is a false security to rely on the space bar. There are some instances when the space bar needs to be a space bar and then it won’t pause the music anyway:
Editing meta data
Naming a new zone, adding a library
Typing a filter in “Focus”
Or like right now! I am typing this on the same computer running Roon… If I need to stop the music I first need to go to Roon…
