Continuous Play [Released!]

Is there a way to create a playlist that will play from beginning to end without stopping at the end of each song? It would be great to have continuous play and have control of how long the pause is between songs or tunes.
Thanks for all you do already!

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That feature idea is definitely on my radar. Actually, there are two related but distinct ideas on my list:

  1. “Playlists”, where an existing song list is used to go from one song to the next in alphabetical/random/custom order. There are different versions of this, where the next song starts playing automatically, or where it’s loaded but not played, or where there’s just a handy button to go to the next song. (The latter is more-or-less available already with the list navigation option.)

  2. “Medleys”, where multiple songs/tunes are put together into a set, all on one screen, that can then be played in order, with each song flowing into the next without pausing. Here’s another thread where this had been discussed in more detail. This is likely to come before the “playlists” feature, as I’ve just refactored a ton of code in a way that makes this much easier to accomplish than ever before, but we’ll see what happens. My current focus is still on the new strumming patterns, although it looks like I’ll have to delay further recording by a few weeks so I may try to squeeze out a new feature like medleys in the meantime…

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Just to add a huge thank you and a vote for the “medley’s” idea, which in my mind is “set”. I play irish music so I usually try to put tunes into sets of 2 or 3. That would be a fantastic addition. Also would be helpful ‘testing out’ set ideas to see if they work or sound bad. Half my ideas sound terrible when I get to try them with my guitar playing friend, and half sound great, this feature would allow me to do a better pre-screening of ideas! :slight_smile:

Status update: played mandolin over a three-tune jig-to-reel medley today! Still need to build a user-friendly interface for combining tunes into a medley, code to save medleys, and more… but playback is working now, which was the biggest hurdle to overcome and required a massive overhaul of the code. Now that I have a working proof of concept, it’s all downhill from here (knock on wood).

And since I’m going to have to delay further recording toward the new strumming patterns for a few weeks, I am going to spend the month of September focusing on getting this medleys/sets feature (and quite possibly the “playlists” feature as well) out for beta testing.

I’ll probably squeeze in a couple other improvements this month too, but we’ll see how things turn out.

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Update: Both medleys and playlists (with a “continuous play” Auto-Advance feature) are now available in the latest beta version of Strum Machine!

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