Version: (using KDE KDE 3.5.1) Installed from: SuSE RPMs Right now, the play counter is increased even when only listening to a track for a few seconds and then pressing "stop". However, it would be more sensible to only increase the play counter if the song has been played completely (this is also the behavior of iTunes).
It's intended to work that way, so, it's not a bug.
OK. However, it doesn't make much sense that way, because I often scan a lot of tracks just for a few seconds, and they get counted, which IMHO shouldn't be the case. As I've already mentioned, maybe amaroK should follow the behavior of iTunes here.
I'm definitely supporting the itunes behavior here. I understand the track rating is based somewhat on play counts, but amaroK shouldn't increase the count if the track isn't played through. It messes up my playlists.. :)
The iTunes behaviour is stupid, if you have some track with silence at the end that you skip over it doesn't count as a play. I much prefer the winamp style of counting as soon as the song starts. IMO a reasonable compromise would be last.fm style behaviour: half way through or 4 minutes in, whatever comes first.
Shane, your suggestion is perfectly OK - the only thing that is annoying right now is that the play counter is increased now matter how long the song was played (i.e. for all times t>0) - that way quickly scanning the first 5 seconds of a track increases the counter, which doesn't make sense at all. It should be changed to e.g. min(t=4min, t=(length of track)/2) (other suggestions?).
IMO it should be calculated in percentage, not in minutes. If you listen to live shows/podcasts or other long files, it shouldn´t count after 4 min. I agree it doesn´t need to be played through completely. Why not make this customizable, isn´t that what KDE is all about? ;)
Very good idea - the user should be able to set the desired value (in % played) maybe?
The last.fm behavior is very sensible -- no matter what you're listening to (podcast/live show/etc), once you've listened for 4 minutes you've heard it! Please don't make this any more complicated than it needs to be with minute customizations etc..
I think the simplest way is just to add an option in preferences to let the user decide if the song counter is increased when the song begins or ends. Maybe later on it could be a percentage function of the song time but I think it would be ok just with a simple checkbox in the preferences. By the way I also would like to have this feature changed for just increasing the counter in the end of the songs. I also offer myself to try to help this development although I would need some guidelines in order to find the exact place in the sourcecode.
*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***
Actually the current behavior is also a bug: If the playback fails for some reason, it is still counted as "played". VERY annoying :-/ At least on my system amarok has problems with continuous playback without gaps: it sometimes fails to open the sound device when starting to play the next track. I guess there is either a "sync()" missing or there is no way to ensure that all the old audio data is processed when "close()" returns so that the next "open()" will succeed.
the easiest implementation (OMO) would be to let the user customize the *consecutive listening time*. percentage requires some math, maybe it would be to hard to implement (developers have a real life also, right? let's keep things easy to implement). personally I would count a song as played when one of these 2 conditions is true: 1) song is played entirely OR 2) song is listened consecuitvely for at least X time. I would personally put 40 seconds for "X", as default. With "consecutively" I mean that the counter (trigger to mark the song as played) would restart each time the user scans (forward, or rewind) the song.
i almost forgot... this feature i think can be realted also to LAST.FM. send to last.fm the data of the played song after the same X seconds configured for counting it as played.
Great idea firepol! Still a percentage would be better since there could be a 20 second song in theory, and then 40 seconds would be an invalid value. When Amarok is playing a song, it should know about its length (shouldn't it?), so calculating e.g. 40% of the total length should be no problem. Resetting this counter when forwarding/backwarding is a good idea though.
a) I doubt we will ever have an option to adjust this parameter b) last.fm has rules for when to submit data - whichever comes first: 50% or 4 minutes of playtime. We can't change these rules
We now only increment playcount if more than half of the song has been played.