Background audio starts automatically regardless of settings

Pumba

Hi,

I’ve been wondering for a while what the "Auto-play background audio" setting for songs does.

At first, I thought this option determined whether the background audio of a song would start playing automatically when a song with background audio is switched from blank to presentation. However, the background audio starts regardless of how I set this option, so I initially thought it was a bug and just lowered the volume to zero so it wouldn’t bother me. In the release notes for version 3.1.3, I saw "Correct media auto-start behavior" and hoped this would address the background audio issue, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Is this a bug, or am I misunderstanding the purpose of this button?

funkydan2

Our church has a different 'workflow' - but this setting works for us.

When the first slide of a song is selected (or you press 'down' on the keyboard from the previous service element), when this option is enabled the song's backing track starts playing straight away.

If the option is not selected, then you have to click the 'play' button to start the attached audio.

I've not tried the blank/display button to control the flow of the service (only use that if we need to switch to an external program for something—like displaying a web-browser on the projector).

Pumba

Ohh, I see what you mean! I just tried it, and that setting does make a difference.

We use the background audio as a backup for instrumental tracks when live instruments aren't available, so we don’t need it very often. As long as we're not doing songs back-to-back, we switch between "blank" and "show presentation" for each song, and every time the background audio kicks in.

It'd be great if this option also controlled the autoplay when switching from blank to showing the song. Do you think that would mess with workflows like yours?

funkydan2

Pumba No, I don't think it would make a difference to how we run OpenLP.

Have you tried creating a blank image slide or a custom slide with no text and using that instead of toggling blank/display? (Part of my aim for running OpenLP is, most of the time, the AV volunteer just has to press the down arrow at the right time—keep it simple!)

Pumba

You're right, that could work, but I think for our specific use case, it makes things a bit more complicated. We're a small church, and every other Sunday we have a part of the service where anyone can contribute. That could be through a personal testimony, reading a Bible verse, or, more often, by requesting a song. Since we don't know all the song choices in advance, our AV volunteers are used to switching to a blank screen and searching for the song on the fly to bring it up in live view. For the services where all the songs are planned ahead of time, the blank slide might be the best option, but for us, it just adds complexity.

I also saw issue 1302 on GitLab, and it seems like the developers are already aware of the problem.