When finishing a listening session I don’t like to quit a song halfway, so what I typically do is that I clear the queue and let the currently playing song finish.
One of the use cases for the Alarm Clock is to stop playback when something else has to be done. If I setup an alarm for this I run into the issue of the terminated song which I, as said, don’t like.
So when combining the above, what I was looking for is a way to set a stop alarm that adjusts its time to a song boundary. I now found a way to do this…
One of the current features of Alarm Clock is a fade-out. Playback ends by reducing the volume over a configured timeframe. This is a way to transition from Play to Stop, stopping at a song boundary is another way to make this transition.
So this is what I’m changing: The transition type becomes a separate setting (besides the transition time) that can be set to:
- Instant
- Fading
- Track Boundary
When Track Boundary is selected the transition time gives the maximum added playback time in minutes. When the alarm expires and the remaining time of the song is less than this transition time then the song will be finished, otherwise the stop will be instant. For popular music a transition time of 5 minutes will work for most cases, for other genres longer times are probably required.
The below screenshot shows a setup for a 30 minutes listening session/sleep timer with a track transition time of 5 minutes.
When used with a sleep timer the nice thing is that a song is played till the end and the other day a wake alarm can continue with the next song of the album.
Note: The stop at Track Boundary is not sample accurate. It can happen that a very short part of the next song is played (less than a second), but this is too short to end up in the History.