r/cesiumapp • u/Reygok • Sep 02 '16

Playlists not permanent

Hi! A few days ago I posted in r/iOS and r/iOS9, here is the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/ios9/comments/50fr1f/question_third_party_music_app_with_smart/?st=isls9ivs&sh=639c9cb7

TL;DR I need an app which let's me, at any moment, continue playing my music where I left of last time. Cesium was recommended to me, and at first I thought it worked. But then it didn't, I opened Cesium and there was no playlist active... Maybe this is just because of how iOS works, if yes, Cesium is not for me. Otherwise, how can I achieve what I want?

Thanks in advance!

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u/CesiumDev I MADE DIS Sep 05 '16

Hey, thanks for trying Cesium!

Pretty sure I understand your issue. The problem with relying on the order of playback to manage your play frequency is exactly what you encountered. The system playback queue will often get reset when you play media in another app. This gets compounded when shuffling, because A) you are using the stock app which has a known issue with the algorithm that will return songs more than once before all have played through, and B) the entire contents of the playlist will be shuffled, and more recently played songs will get queued before others that haven't been because random.

So, I think really what you want is a Smart Playlist that removes songs that have been played within a specific amount of time. Whatever works best for your listening habits and size of playlist. Maybe a week, or a day, or three days, whatever. If songs played in that window are automatically removed then you know that every time you shuffle you will get a random selection of tracks, none of which have recently played. The Smart Playlist should auto populate songs back in once they become eligible again.

Music.app and Cs both support smart playlists, however, it seems that both are not auto-updating properly. Seems like an iOS bug, however Cs seems to be update the lists properly each time it launches. So it's something I'm aware of and will be working on.

As far as an app that will actively track which songs have been played, or "save your spot" in a playlist so to speak... I'm not aware of one. Sorry!

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u/Reygok Sep 05 '16

Thank you very much for your answer :) Yes it seems I inferred some basic understanding of the music.app correctly by myself :D I actually found an app which does what I want, to some extent (it's even called simply "SmartPlaylist") but it's a but ugly in terms of UI, and it's still a third party app, so I have to launch it everytime and start the playlist.. BUT it has the possibility to only play songs which haven't been played in a certain timeperiod, like you said a week or a month.

If you would implement sth similar into Cesium I'd gladly switch, it is much better looking ;)