Spacebar

Firstly, it’s great to see the shared support provided by forum members as well as the extraordinary effort Torben and his support crew (if there’s such a thing) put into Mairlist… Well done :slight_smile:

Back in another lifetime Torben, you initiated a request for spacebar action in automation mode.

In this action, for those of us familiar with Simian and the like, spacebar initiates “Play” from a stopped position, and “Play Next Event” when audio is playing.

Now (and I can already hear the howls of discontent from some forum contributers), may I request that Spacebar also invoke the same actions in Assist mode.

I remember your comments at the time, some 2 years ago, I recall, that you stated that Spacebar is “hardwired” as a Windows action and accordingly not available as an assignable (hot)key.

Likewise may I ask that “Esc” be invoked as a hardwired “Stop” choice.

Something tells me that this might cause conflict, however.

Ducking for cover yet again, I remain…

Chris, I’m intrigued.

If you have the spacebar hard-wired, how on earth do you type in searches for artists or songs while mAirList is running?

BFN
CAD

Hello CAD

Presumably it’s a matter of focus.

http://www.bsiusa.com/software/simian/simian.php has used it since day one f I recall.

Update…

My memory is definitely failing!

[quote=“Torben, post:4, topic:3683”]Yes, it is intentional, and also inevitable, because all the “find the next item” logic is disabled while in assist mode. But of course you can emulate it with a script like this:

begin CurrentPlaybackControl.SetAutomation(true); CurrentPlaybackControl.AutomationNext; CurrentPlaybackControl.SetAutomation(false); end.

It activates the automation, issues a NEXT command, and then switches back to assist.

Torben[/quote]

Still, despite my answering my own question, it would be handy to have a hard wired choice if possible for live assist.

Unlike other keys, the spacebar keypress event is always reported to the window control currently in focus, and not to the application-wide message handler (the same applies to Escape, iirc). This is why it cannot be used as an ordinary hotkey in mAirList.

As Chris already pointed out, making this option work also in assist mode makes no sense, as there is no “next” in assist mode. I presume the most favorable solution would be to replace that option by a generic “when spacebar is pressed, execute the following command: …” setting. You can then choose whether to keep “AUTOMATION 1 NEXT” or enter “RUNSCRIPT c:\spacebar.mls” instead. The script would of course have to check if automation is already active and omit the SetAutomation commands if so.

Let’s keep this as a feature request for v3.