I guess you could summarize the broad subject here as follows:
- you are listening to a podcast or audiobook, i.e. something that takes multiple sittings
- to save your position ('bookmark') for later one might pause, write down the timestamp somewhere and return to that timestamp later
I'm used to this kind of workflow with videos too. The fatigued and bewildered part comes in with podcasts and audiobooks because I am using musicbee as my player. I don't have a good workflow, and I haven't had any success in letting musicebee handle some of this work for me.
1) Music Bee has a bookmark feature. (I will refer to them as 'built in bookmarks' to distinguish it from the ad hoc way of writing down a timestamp).
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- One use of the built in bookmarks (perhaps the best use) is to write down the timestamp for you.
- Using the built in bookmark feature to *resume playing* isn't worth using in my experience because it doesn't fully replicate the equivalent function it is trying to. You lose the ability to rewind to earlier portions of the file, and you lose the ability to tell at a glance how far you are into the file.
- resuming a built in bookmark doesn't always resume at that timestamp. Sometimes it resumes at a completely unrelated time, namely the last recorded time at which you stopped listening to the file (inevitably causing problems for you). Maybe this eventually got fixed?
- Built in bookmarks have a notion of 'start' and 'end'. I'm not clear what benefit this is, so it effectively just means you have to press the bookmark hotkey twice whenever you want to bookmark. Pressing it once is going to eventually lead to mistakes where the program interprets your hotkey as the 'end' of some bookmark you made an hour ago, when in fact you are only ever pressing the hotkey with the mental intention of creating a *new* bookmark.
- The bookmark list isn't always ordered chronologically (meaning in terms of timestamps, example:
http://i57.tinypic.com/qnwfbm.png), which eventually leads to mistakes where you use what you *think* is the bookmark that you created the last time, but isn't. You waste 5 minutes before you go "didn't I listen to all this?"
2) Starting and stopping files (when you want to write down a timestamp and when you want to return to it)
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- I don't think Musicbee has a "goto" hotkey. Something like ctrl+g "go to time xy minute, zw second". You can only "goto" using manual interactions with the progress bar and the various fast forward/seek forward hotkeys. I wish musicbee did have a goto hotkey because I would use it five times a day to return to my last recorded timestamp.
- Sometimes when you manually seek somewhere by dragging the progress bar, the location changes to a different pixel (potentially resulting in an offset +/- 30 seconds or more) once you release the left mouse button. I think this got fixed recently though, because it hasn't happened to me in a while.
- Musicbee is inconsistent in how it displays the current time position in the progress bar. I *think* it goes like this: If the file is under 100 minutes, it will display the current progress followed by a slash followed by the remaining time as a negative number (e.g. "4 : 30 / - 5 : 30" if you are 4 and a half minutes in and there are 5 and a half minutes left). But if the file is over 100 minutes, it *only displays the remaining time and not the current time*. This causes a huge problem if you were A) attempting to write down the current timestamp or B) you are later seeking to that timestamp using the seek hotkeys. (mental picture: you want to seek to the 83rd minute, 15th second position. The only information available is that there are 155 minutes and 2 seconds from where you are to the end. The UI might not even have the total time displayed anywhere if the playlist with the file isn't open!)
- The built in bookmarks use the "xyz minutes : ss seconds" format, as does the tooltip when dragging the progress bar. I believe in an older version of Musicbee the progress bar (not tooltip) would use "hh hours : mm minutes : ss seconds" format. It might seem strange to point out this inconsistency (and it is) but due to the lack of a "goto" feature it caused problems. If I'm manually using the seek hotkeys to return to the time "283 minutes 32 seconds" I would have to do mental arithmetic to convert that to hh:mm:ss.
tl;dr
I listen to long podcasts and audiobooks frequently and don't have a great workflow for stopping and resuming.
Disclaimer: I'm not really unhappy or anything, and I don't claim to know better when it comes to UI. I've just mentally noted stuff from day to day, and the mental debris in my brain needs to be cleared out.
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