At last I have found out how to turn disc autorepeat off in Grip#
Wed, 05 Jun 2002 22:01:42 +0000
At last I have found out how to turn disc autorepeat off in Grip. Now, I know that nobody takes my ideas on usability seriously (I admitted that I like Emacs, which pretty much lost me all credibility with the point-click brigade), but ...
- Click the `config' tab, then the 'CD' tab of the inner tab set. Observe no option to kill the autorepeat.
- Check all the other tabs in case it's somewhere stupid like 'misc' instead. Nope
- Click on the Help tab, observe that all the buttons in there do absolutely nothing at all. I don't have the gnome help browser installed, but silent failure? The Unix Philosophy(sic) is strong in this one, master.
- Um. Guess there's no such option, then. Return to using xmcd
- Some months later when new version of grip available, go clicking
very slowly on the "buttons they'd put on a real cd player if real cd players
were designed by vcr manufacturers" section at the bottom, so that we
can see the tooltips
- The button marked "123" is tooltipped "Toggle play mode options"
- When clicked, it creates two more buttons to click on, plus an expanse of grey space.
- The (right-hand) button tipped "Toggle loop play" switches between two fairly obvious hieroglyphs - obvious if you ever had a cassette tape player with "autoreverse", anyway. Problem solved, but
- The other button ("Rotate play mode" - yes! let's listen to our
cds using rotated play! eh what?) cycles between "->?", "N"
and "PL". I'm guessing these denote any of Hyperspace Jump, Neutral
(Natural numbers? Could be a Dangerous Bend sign, actually) and
Poland. If anyone can tell me what a rotated Polish play mode is (in
a programming context I'd guess something best implemented with an
operand stack), answers on a postcard ...
In Polish mode it also changes the "random grey space we apparently didn't have enough buttons left to fill" into "random white space we apparently didn't have enough buttons left to fill". Cool. Maybe it's not Polish, then. Placard mode? Placebo mode, could be.
I can only assume they're aspiring to the xmms user interface.
("Initiate/abort DiscDB lookup"? What's wrong with "Look up disc/track titles"? If there's a lookup in progress, change the tooltip to "Cancel title lookup". The icon for that one appears to be a picture of two petrol pumps having sex.)
I'm tempted also to rail about the track skip buttons (click five times on "next track" and it click click clicks five tracks forward, then suddenly skips back again four of them), the skip-forward-in-track button which when held down for five seconds goes click click click with no other audio output, then resumes play fifty seconds further on when released, and the not-always-notice-when-disc-ejected behaviour which causes the new cd, if longer, to stop playing before it actually gets to the end. Some or all of these may be bugs in my cd player hardware, though, so it may not be fair to blame grip.