Restric shuffle mode options and start by voice command

[Yukusoona]

Dear makers of Poweramp,

I have installed Poweramp on my Samsung Galaxy S9 (android 10) to try out an alternative to Samsung Music. So far I like the app very much, thank you! I'd like to purchase it. One of the things that drove me away from Samsung Music, i.e. my phone's stock app, was a way to manage play lists in a better way and to control music via voice input (using google assistant while I am driving my car).

I miss the following two things:

- There are 5 different random categories, which are activated by repeatedly pressing the "shuffle" button or by pressing and holding it. Anyway, in my case I would only need one of the shuffle categories ("shuffle songs from current playlist"). Maybe in a future update, you could allow to restrict shuffle modes to those ones, the user actually needs / wants to have? In my case, I could then easily switch between "shuffle" and "no shuffle" by simply pressing once without having to double check whether I ended up in the right category.

- I really love to start a playlist by voice command (google assistant) while in my car. Unfortunately, when I finally manage to start a certain playlist by voice command (which is not easy in itself, playlists are often not properly recognized), it would always start in "no shuffle" mode. So when I give the voice command to play "my favorites", Poweramp would always begin with the first song on the list and go further song by song. It's a pity... Poweramp does not begin in "shuffle mode" even if I try to implement it in my voice command. After the playlist has been started, though, I can add a new voice command via google assistant saying "shuffle". Poweramp accepts my command but it ends up in "shuffle all songs", leaving the playlist that I have just activated and wanted to listen to. So, to sum up: I dearly miss an option to start a specific playlist in random mode by voice command.

Thank you very much!

[andrewilley]

(1) It has been suggested previously to make tapping the Shuffle (and possibly Repeat) icon work as a simple on/off toggle, which would enable or disable the user's most recent selection. Long-press can still be used to select from the various options. There does seem some merit in that logic to me too, as I more often want to simply turn Shuffle off (or back on again) rather than having to cycle through five choices (or ten, as I usually overshoot) to get to where I want.

(2) Google Voice Commands can be a bit hit and miss generally to be honest, and while basic commands like "play [song] by [artist]" work, more complex sequences often do not. I don't know if this is down to Poweramp or Google though.

Andre

[Yukusoona]

Thank you for your reply.

(1) Good to hear that you are of a similar opinion. Hopefully, this will become customizable some day?

(2) I could not have said it better myself: "can be a bit hit and miss", that is true! Anyway, Poweramp seems to receive my voice command "shuffle" but unfortunately chooses the bad one for me: i.e. shuffle among all songs available. I hoped that if Poweramp let me restrict the shuffle options to the one I needed (at the same time deactivating the other ones), that maybe asking Poweramp to shuffle via Google assistant would give me the result I needed: i.e. shuffle among those songs of the last playlist that has been selected. I posted this request because I thought that voice commands are being send from Google assistant to Poweramp and that it is up to Poweramp to process them properly. In that case my request would be quite useful as I hope. If that's more a problem on Google's side, well, then I understand that no more can be done here.