Yes, VLC is the only media player which adds this information. I use the queue position to keep my eyes on the road, rather than trying to figure out the difference between the current track and the requested track based solely on names and my memory. If I see I’m at track 10 and someone in the back seat wants to listen to track 20, I just hit my steering wheel thumb switch 10 times. I was missing that information under Android Auto, and my passengers had grown accustomed to using it under the Toyota Entune UI. That system also has a thumb wheel, so I could use the steering wheel switch for a couple of presses or spin the wheel to quickly navigate through the 100’s of tracks on the USB stick.However, you are correct, there is no customization at present. If you could customize it, what would the options be?
- No position information
- Position information prior to artist – album
- Position information prior to title with bullet separator (automatic wrap)
- Position information prior to title with newline (forced control character)
- Position information after title with bullet separator (automatic wrap) and forced abbreviation of the title at 40 characters – length(position info)
Option #4 is probably the clearest to the driver (since the title can wrap into two lines, whereas the subtitle only gets one), but the control character is unpredictable across native head unit software. I ended up removing half-spaces (Google uses half spaces in between the elapsed / total time) because Chevy’s software displays squares instead (it also doesn’t understand RTL/LTR control characters, but that’s another story). That sort of brings us back to option #3, since it will probably have the fewest side effects. One of your suggestions is after the title, but I can’t guarantee it ends up on the screen. I can do a little bit of math and force abbreviation of the title, but it’s iffy because I can’t compute the width of the characters to account for the difference between an ‘l’ and ‘M’. The queue info will also move around based on the length of the title, so the driver will not have a consistent place to scan for the information.
We just added Android Auto specific settings on the car screen and this might be good candidate for a future update. (The settings button will only work in a beta or final release delievered through the play store. You can’t test it using a nightly.). One problem with customization is that it’s often a dumping ground for bad ideas that need to be discarded during UI design, so while I see the value in flexibility, giving people a bunch of bad options isn’t really helpful either.
This is an old thread, but I thought I would receive a notification when there were responses, but I guess I did not activate that, so I am just now seeing the responses. Thank you for your responses, and I will now turn on notifications.
I think similar to “mindlessbuddha,” I almost always just do shuffle/random play of my entire library, so the position information is not particularly useful. And, as I described in my original post, that information can consume quite a bit of the space on the Android Auto display–particularly if there are thousands or tens of thousands of tracks in the library.
I would prefer a setting that produces:
Title
Position Information
Artist – Album
That said, I don’t think I have ever seen two separate lines of information for the Title (2018 Hyundai Sonata), and I don’t know how the subtitles or special characters work. So, for vehicles that cannot handle these to produce the above, then I guess Option #3 would be the safest:
Position Information • Title
Artist – Album
On a related topic, I have also noted that, when I am in shuffle mode for the entire library, the queue list does not show the shuffled tracks. It just shows the track in alphabetical order of the rest of the tracks in the library.
Statistics: Posted by splinke — 28 May 2024 08:59