I have to admit, that personally I’m a huge fan of “tap to play”. Maybe I’m just simple minded – just playing a single album is all a need 🙂
Anyway – with their latest update (6.4) Sonos made “Tap To Play” a default in all their Controllers as well, but unfortunately also fed up a lot of people with this change, because larger playlists/queues are always in danger to be erased too easily.
So why not help those that invest a lot of time into building individual playlists with SonoPad?
With the latest version of SonoPad (v1.9.0) I changed the options in the context menu of each playable item.
You now can choose between “Play (Replace Queue)” and “Play (Keep Queue)” here. The latter one works as you have been used to with the older Sonos Controller. The item is put to the end of the queue, but starts to play instantly.
But this is only half of the story. On SonoPads settings screen (small button on the bottom right) you can also choose a “playlist modification” mode. When you set this to “Always Ask”, SonoPad will just behave as you are used to from Sonos version 6.3.
Anytime you tap an album or single track, the small popup will come up automatically and ask you what to do.
Of course if you choose wrong you will still erase the Queue, but still I think this is a good compromise for both camps – those who want to create queues and those who don’t.
Some people might ask, why I don’t put this option into a “playlist modification mode” as well. The answer is very easy: you can easily forget how huuuuge your playlists will get. This in turn will degrade the Apps performance sooner or later and I simply don’t want this to happen. Also remember, that I’m still supporting iPad1!
This is why I decided, that users should deliberatly choose between replacing or keeping the playlist.