Listen to a piece played earlier?

[Mal]

Listening to the breakfast programme on the computer you are given a list of pieces played earlier on the programme. When a piece I don't want to hear is played, I'd like to go back and listen to something earlier that I missed. Computer says "22 minutes earlier". But there are problems with this. First, you have to do some mental artithemtic to work out the time it was played. Not too onerous, perhaps, but secondly (and far more unfortunately) the timings are wrong! I went back 22 minutes and something totally different was played. This might be a problem with page refresh. But there's a simple way get round all these problems - state the actual time the piece was played. Then you simply have to scroll back to that time using the scroll bar (which shows the actual time played.)

[Mal]

... part of the problem is that "22 minutes" ago remains on screen throughout the piece being played - so you are left totally in the dark as regards timing - "22 minutes" ago must mean 22 minutes before this piece started. But you don't know precisely how long the current piece has been playing! Again, this would be sorted if the actual time the earlier piece started playing is given to us.

[Serial_Apologist]

Not that I have ever used this facility, but would it really take that long to just go back with the slider and roughly locate where the thing you want to hear again starts? It can't surely take longer than trying to do complicated calculations without the necessary data?

[smittims]

I have a similar problem with 'Through the Night' as the time shown on the slider doesn't correspond with the clock time given in the schedule. More mental arithmetic, which for a bear of little brain is hard.

[Serial_Apologist]

I have a similar problem with 'Through the Night' as the time shown on the slider doesn't correspond with the clock time given in the schedule. More mental arithmetic, which for a bear of little brain is hard.

Can't one play with slider and get to something that sounds a bit like what you think might be your number, then try and locate the starting point? Or are the "tolerances" just too tiny?

[ardcarp]

It's definitely trial and error in my case...usually the latter.

[french frank]

It's definitely trial and error in my case...usually the latter.

Strange.There used to be small white diamond-shaped markers that marked each piece on the progress bar, with up a pop-up 'song' title when you hovered over it. Ditched a few years ago, presumably for a reason though I don't know what it was.

[Andrew Slater]

If you can delay your listening for 24 hours you could use my database or playlist schedules to read off the programme offset times for each piece. The timings (unhelpfully in seconds) do appear in the underlying BBC webpages, but do not display in browsers. A few years ago I wrote some code to get a programme's playlist with timings 'on-demand', but the BBC changed the page format and I never got round to re-writing the code to suit, I'm afraid.

[Mal]

If you can delay your listening for 24 hours you could use my database...

I can click through to BBC sounds but it appears without the scroll bar!

Are they trying to defeat "on demand" listening?

[Mal]

Strange.There used to be small white diamond-shaped markers that marked each piece on the progress bar, with up a pop-up 'song' title when you hovered over it. Ditched a few years ago, presumably for a reason though I don't know what it was.

I remember those, very useful they were. They also had links to Spotify that now seem to have disappeared.

If I ran a record company I'd be telling BBC to ditch the triangles, exact timings & streaming links - otherwise we might spend all day listening to radio 3 and not buy any CDs.

[french frank]

If I ran a record company I'd be telling BBC to ditch the triangles, exact timings & streaming links - otherwise we might spend all day listening to radio 3 and not buy any CDs.

I suspect the idea is to encourage people to listen to it as background sound from beginning to end - or until they've heard enough/have to go out. You're not supposed to pick and choose. Yes, pressure from the record industry also involved, no doubt.