Resetting playback position clears played status

[Tagarela_Midia]

App version: 3.4.1 (Google Play)

Current behaviour: Resetting an episode’s playback position clears its played status to unplayed.

Expected behaviour: Resetting the playback position should do just that, without changing the played/unplayed status.

First occurred: It’s been like that for as long as I’ve used the app.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Long-tap an episode
2. Select Reset Playback Position
3. Playback position will be reset, but so also will be its played status

[Thub]

If we presume the playback position starts at the beginning of the episode before you start listening, then resetting the position would logically return it to the beginning of an episode which would imply that it is not been listened to. This is how I would expect it to behave.

If what you want is to mark a partially listened episode as played and remove the playback position, then simply mark it as played; you can think of it as resetting the position to the end of the episode and it will no longer show the playback position in the episode list.

[Tagarela_Midia]

@Thub

resetting the position would logically return it to the beginning of an episode which would imply that it is not been listened to

You don’t have kids, do you?

Or even for adults, isn’t there a case for listening to the same track over and over? Guided meditation, for instance? Having the playback position set at the beginning for those doesn’t imply that it is not been listened to.

@Thub

If what you want is to mark a partially listened episode as played and remove the playback position, then simply mark it as played; you can think of it as resetting the position to the end of the episode and it will no longer show the playback position in the episode list.

Ok, that sort of works… but

1. It only works for single tracks, not in multi-select;
2. It requires two steps — mark as unplayed, then mark as played — bc mark as played is not available for paused episodes; and
3. It doesn’t work with swipe action; setting it to toggle played state doesn’t reset the playback position when toggling it to played.

All of that could be sorted if reset playback position did just that, reset the playback position, nothing else.

[Thub]

@Tagarela_Midia

You don’t have kids, do you?

I tend to download stuff like that and use the music player instead of a podcast app, but I can see how that can be onerous if the popular stuff changes often. Maybe there is some room for better functionality here.

@Tagarela_Midia

Or even for adults, isn’t there a case for listening to the same track over and over? Guided meditation, for instance? Having the playback position set at the beginning for those doesn’t imply that it is not been listened to.

When an episode is marked as played and you choose to play it again, it will start at the beginning of the episode. I’m not sure what’s missing here in terms of the functionality.

@Tagarela_Midia

1. It only works for single tracks, not in multi-select;
2. It requires two steps — mark as unplayed, then mark as played — bc mark as played is not available for paused episodes; and

Marking multi-selected episodes as played works for me, as does marking paused episodes as played as well as the opposite. Both of these seem like bugs worthy of their own bug reports if they aren’t working for you.

@Tagarela_Midia

3. It doesn’t work with swipe action; setting it to toggle played state doesn’t reset the playback position when toggling it to played.

I can see why they might want to leave the playback position in place when toggling the played state. People are going to be annoyed if they accidentally swipe and lose their position, this allows for a quick “undo”. However I think this could be done more elegantly.

In any case, I agree with you here in that I would like to see more options for swipe actions in general and specifically, reset playback position makes perfect sense to me as a separate option. For example you could use the episodes view filtered by favourites – downloaded favourites don’t get deleted automatically by default – and set the episode view’s left swipe action to reset the playback position and quickly find and play the popular episodes.

I see this one as more of a feature request.

@Tagarela_Midia

All of that could be sorted if reset playback position did just that, reset the playback position, nothing else.

I guess I still don’t understand why the played state is important if you’re about to listen to it again anyway.

[Tagarela_Midia]

@Thub

Marking multi-selected episodes as played works for me, as does marking paused episodes as played as well as the opposite.

Works for me too, but doesn’t reset the playback position as you described, which does work for a single episode.

@Thub

I can see why they might want to leave the playback position in place when toggling the played state. People are going to be annoyed if they accidentally swipe and lose their position, this allows for a quick “undo”.

Fair enough. This then makes even more the case for reset playback position not interfering with the played state, since in that case toggling the played state doesn’t interfere with the playback position.

@Thub

I guess I still don’t understand why the played state is important if you’re about to listen to it again anyway.

Bc I’d rather play, and the kid would rather listen to, an unlistened episode, but if there aren’t any, then a rerun of a listened episode from a favourite podcast will do. Indeed it seems a lot of the functionality in AP stems from this assumption that podcasts will only be listened to once, which is generally true of news and commentary podcasts but not of time insensitive content, e.g.:

@Tagarela_Midia

My use case of podcasts is not as source of news or current affairs, but rather as a library (kids stories usually, but I think this is the case of anyone listening to time insensitive content). It’s not often we’re waiting for new episodes; we’re more often rummaging for podcasts, and binge listening to all episodes till we move on to the next one.

In either case, it’d make more sense for AntennaPod to set queued episodes for download than inboxed ones (and if it is set to put new episodes in the queue, it’d download them too).