Multiple "Now Playing" Queues

[Alsweider]

If you listen to an audio book or podcast, then you take a break, listen to some music and after that you want to resume your book. But the book queue is gone and you have to find the exact position again where you paused the last time. This would be easier with the option to open multiple tabs of "now playing" queues and to restart the playback at the exact position of a book where you left it.

[frankz]

I don't know about Podcasts, but, for me, if I'm listening to an audiobook and then go listen to some music and then go back to the audiobook, MB remembers were I was in the audiobook.  I suspect podcasts are the same.  If it's not doing this for you, something is wrong.

I've never used an audiobook player that didn't remember playback positions across different listening sessions.  It's pretty basic audiobook player functionality.

[leadfoot]

Why limit to music vs audiobooks? What if you have a multiple-day-long playlist, but want to shift to something else for a few hours, and come back to where you left off? Or compare bands and quickly switch between two (or more) playlists.

It's a great idea...

[Stronuk]

This is such a useful feature to have. An example of a good implementation can be found in the Android application Musicolet. We can pause and resume across multiple now playing lists. I give my vote to add this feature.

[Pickles7853]

I have never used an AudioBook, so grain of salt here, but are they considered regular music files like MP3s where they have full tag support?
If so you should be able to make it work as you want.

Right click >> Edit >> Settings [tab] >> [check] remember playback position
Not sure if this setting applies to AudioBooks or only standard music files though.

[tjinc]

+1
An interesting idea that maybe deserves a little more consideration (I also use Musicolet, although infrequently).

Right click >> Edit >> Settings [tab] >> [check] remember playback position
Not sure if this setting applies to AudioBooks or only standard music files though.

This is actually MusicBee's default setting for both audiobook and podcast files and works well when stopping and restarting a single track. However with multi-track audiobooks (or stand-up comedy, spoken word albums...) it does not remember which track you were on in the 'album'.

You may also have cobbled together a Playing Tracks list which you want/need to stop, listen to something else, and then come back to at a later time - admittedly, you can save the list to a new playlist when stopping but even then you will still lose your position.

How Musicolet acts here (this may need to be corrected):
Whenever you stop playing, the Playing Tracks list (queue) is automatically saved along with your exact position in it (both track# and time in that track).
It will save the most recent 20 queues, after which it will over-write the oldest. You can pick any one of these 20 and load it back up at any time, picking up exactly where you left off.


So maybe something similar, but probably more suitable for the MusicBee platform would be to have a limited number of slots to manually save (via menu/hotkey/toolbar button?) the current Playing Tracks list, along with the track position and play time in it. The theory being that any one of these could then be reloaded at any time so that you could continue where you left off.
It's just a thought.

[Pickles7853]

I think I remember running across this issue when I was messing around with cue files.  I noticed that if the listing was a virtual file then certain settings from the tag editor could be applied without error but were not saved to the DB.  This sounds like the same problem considering it seems to be only multi-track audiobooks which exhibit an issue.

[Steven]

This is done for v3.7
You explicitly save the playing tracks to a named file, which can then be loaded again in the future. MB remembers the current playing track and resumes from the play position as well.

[tjinc]

Nice - I'll look forward to trying this.