Is there a way to make syrinscape work like a music playlist?

Support
#1

In my next session, I am running a time loop, so I put together a list of songs in a playlist, and set them up to play them in order so whenever they repeat the time loop I can have the songs play in the exact same order. My problem is that I will need to sometimes pause and then resume the playlist. I see that I can click on the element to pause that song, but when I click again to resume, it plays that element but then jumps to a random element and plays it sequentially after that.

The problem is I don’t want the order to randomly change after resuming the list- is there a way to make it only play every element in the list in order even after pausing and resuming? Thanks!

#2

Howdy, thanks for your feedback!

Firstly, I wanted to clarify a few things. Are you are using the Web Player (https://app.syrinscape.com/), or are you using one of the Offline Players (Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Board Game)?

Also, what exactly are you hoping for? It seems like there are a few different behaviours:

  1. Stop a sequential Element. Later start that Element from the top of the Playlist.
  2. Stop a sequential Element. Later start that Element and have it resume from where it was partway through a song.
  3. Stop a sequential Element. Later start that Element and have it start the same song it was playing when stopped.
  4. Stop a sequential Element. Later start that Element and have it start the next song in the list, as if the last played song just finished.

Based on your discussion regarding restarting the time loop then repeating the same sequence of songs, #1 seems like you would want, but you also mention wanting to pause and resume the playlist, which could be any of #2, #3 or #4 (or perhaps some other options I have not thought of).

Incidentally, it seems that currently the Web Player does #1, and the Offline Players do #4. The behaviour of the Web Player is initially surprising to us and we may investigate and potentially change this at some point, but for right now, depending what you are after, you might find some success with duplicating the Element several times, each with a different starting Song, so that you can start the sequence from any point in the Playlist. You will have to make sure you wait for the full fade out time before starting the Element again to see it reset, and not just resume from where it was fading out.

There are potentially other options, depending on what you like, a double click of the Element will skip playback to the next Playlist entry, which combined with reducing the Element volume to 0 while you skip to the right song might work for you.

Also in case you did not notice, the Property Inspector should highlight the currently playing Playlist entry, so you have a way to check where it is, if the volume is muted or the sound is otherwise not telling you :slight_smile:

#3

Thanks for responding! So I am using the web player, I should have said that earlier, I always forget there are other options.

Based on your list, I’m not sure exactly which one is what I want so let me describe more clearly with a scenario. Lets say I’m playing the play list and it has 10 songs: song 1, song 2, song 3…etc. I start the mood and the element containing all the songs starts playing in order. I listen to song 1, song 2, and song 3. Then when song 4 starts I need to pause, so I click the arrow in the element playlist and it pauses song 4.Later on, I want to keep the songs going in sequential order so I click the play arrow on song 4.

What I want it to do is play song 4 and then play song 5, 6, 7 etc. But the behavior I observed is that it doesn’t continue sequentially. Instead, it plays song 4, then jumps to a random song in the element playlist (lets say song 7) and then continues sequentially. I am not sure if there is a way to make it just revert back to playing all the songs sequentially after unpausing.

Thanks!

#4

Ah, thanks for explaining, I think I see what is happening! The Play/Stop buttons in the Playlist entry list are intended to be used to audition a Sample and hear what it sounds like with the properties of the Element (e.g. reverb, position, etc.).

Using them during a game play session to control what is happening is not how we imagined they would be used :smiley:

So, to explain what is happening - when you click to stop a Playlist entry, you have not actually stopped the Element itself, so it will continue to play the next Playlist entry when it was scheduled to do so (same as if you didn’t stop the previous song). So in this way, the Playlist entry buttons are independent of the Element coin icon shown in the Elements window.

I am not sure how many songs you have, but it really seems like you want to not be touching the Playlist entries at all, and instead have one Element per song, each Element configured to be sequential, and containing all the songs in order, just starting at a different song for each Element. So, if you had 3 songs, you would have 3 Elements:

Element 1:

  1. Song 1
  2. Song 2
  3. Song 3

Element 2:

  1. Song 2
  2. Song 3
  3. Song 1

Element 3:

  1. Song 3
  2. Song 1
  3. Song 2

This way, you can stop whichever Element is currently playing, and then start the appropriate Element to get the sequence going again from the right point. You should be able to duplicate the Element you have now and reorder the Playlist entries to suit.

Does something like this work?

All that said, you have given us something to think about, maybe clicking Play on a Playlist entry should start the Element and continue from that place, but I suspect it will take some thought to nut out the details.

#5

Yeah I have 16 songs on the list so it would require a lot of duplicate elements, but I don’t actually want songs to loop at all, so as in imperfect solution maybe I can dupe it once or twice and then delete out whatever songs come before I need to pause as a solution.

On a side note, I know this is a very specific scenario, but I definitely could see a number of reasons why people might want to play songs in a more playlist style and be able to pause and resume, particularly for music, so it would be great if that was an option one day.

#6

I think it might be what you suggested, but just to be clear, Elements are pretty cheap to make (and duplicate, even the 16 you could make ahead of time I would not expect to be a problem), so as long as you keep the original complete list handy, you should be able to even on the fly duplicate the Element and then delete the songs as needed on the duplicate, and hopefully you already found that you can uncheck Repeat when the playlist is exhausted? to let the Element naturally stop at the end of the list.

Thanks for your continued support, and we’ll muse about Playlist entries some more, especially if some other users can help direct by dropping in their use cases in this thread as well!

#7

Just dropping in to note that, although I don’t have this exact “issue”, I also use Syrinscape mostly as a better way to play playlists during DnD. So any musings on this topic would also be welcome to me! :slight_smile:

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