As y’all know I’ve hacked a lamp switch to start and stop music so I can do it screenlessly but the other day I added a new feature: “stop after playing the current song completely”. Instead of abruptly pausing. It’s so calming compared to a jarring end. One would think subtle things like that wouldn’t matter.
So the first button short press is now a three way toggle between “playing normally”, “end after this song”, and “paused now”. Long press is a li’l overloaded because it means “stop fully right now, and also load the previous playlist but don’t start it until I press play”.
Middle two buttons short press are next and prev album, respectively, and long press is next and prev song. I know it’s a li’l awkward and non-standard to long press to a specific song but more often I just wanna skip the current one and I much more often wanna skip around album-wise. And I’ve made it so that if two songs or streams don’t have an album metadata they do count as different so I can easily jump between them. Most of my playlists are full albums queued up sequentially but this feature is good for when I do wanna make one of individual songs or even radio station streams.
Last button short press switches to the next playlist and plays it right away. So normally if I want tunes, I typically don’t press the
top button; I more often press the album skip back or forwards or the playlist forward. Long press last button specifically plays the song “Thrift Shop” by Postmodern Jukebox, our “time to clean up” song for when game nights end. (PMJ have songs where I like the original and their cover, and they have songs where I hate the original and love their cover, like this one and “Rude” and “Closer”.) I originally also could start lofigirl on here but the hifiberry version of mpd I have installed can sometimes glitch out when there are YouTube streams anywhere in the playlist. They needed to live on this hardcoded button since their stream URLs change all the time and yt-dlp -g got the fresh ones.
I can also control the mpd from tablets if I do want to jump to a specific song easily or seek within songs or play something that’s not in a playlist. If I can stomach screens for three seconds. And from cron; it stops fully at ten pm no matter what, a feature I had before the lamp switch. That actually was the impetus for the switch hack in the first place; I figured out I could just leave music playing and then turn off the entire amp (it’s a Tivoli model two, the original one, I think they’ve reused that model name but this is the mid-00s model two with the power supply changed to get rid of the DC hum) instead when I wanted a break, but then starting it each morning was a problem.
The set of playlists I can change it pretty easily. When I do have screens out I can just queue up any albums with the mpc wrapper scripts I’ve used for ten years (inspired by how Muine which, it’s insane how that player paradigm didn’t become standard) and if I want to save it as a playlist I can from a script. Or I can change stuff out on the existing playlists or delete them entirely. I don’t want too many. The playlists can be a mix of single songs, full albums, or even radio streams (obv I need to skip past them when I’m done listening to them since they don’t end).