Stop buttons on media players?

Thursday, July 5th, 2007

Why is it that so many media players omit the stop button in their interfaces? I guess I missed the meeting where it was decided that the stop button was useless and shouldn’t be featured in players any more. A stop button is not useless, and not having one is very annoying because:

• I often have to walk away from the PC and if there was a nice song playing, I want to hear it from the start again. Media players that don’t have a stop button don’t allow me to simply restart the song by pressing the stop button and the play button. I’ll have to unpause the song and drag the progress meter back to the starting position (which often doesn’t work correctly in players) or I have to skip to the next song and then skip backwards, or I have to double click the song to play it from the beginning (which doesn’t work in a lot of players either).
• I listen to radio streams a lot and when I have to leave the PC for a moment, I’ll usually stop the stream. Now, I could use the pause button to do that, of course, but the problem is that streams are always buffered. So after unpausing the stream playback, it’ll play a small buffered bit of the stream and then stop playback and reconnect to the stream. Most media players I’ve encountered don’t even do this correctly, as they usually skip to the next radio station in my playlist.
• When I really like a song, I’d like to listen to it a couple of times straight away. With a stop button, I could just stop and start the song so that it starts playing again from the beginning.

What’s the big problem with providing a stop button? I guess developers don’t see the added value or something. And when you write a patch for the player so that it does contain a media player, the developers won’t accept it because they don’t think it adds anything. Well, obviously they’re wrong since there’s somebody that took the time to create a patch for it.

Considering the enormous amount of media players out there, it’s strange that there isn’t a single player that’s really really good. I’ve tried them all, and they’ve all got their defects. Either they don’t have a stop button, they’re too slow when they need to read my music collection, the playlist management sucks, don’t do streaming audio, etc.

Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to keep on trying every new media player that pops up until I find one that does get the job done.