Automatic chained voice messages playback (playlist behavior)
This is an enhancement suggestion based on what I can see while testing Fractal 6 from Flathub.
TLDR: would be nice to be able to autoplay "batches of voice messages" one after another, as if they were a playlist.
Problem statement
Some people send batches of voice messages instead of text, for various reasons:
- they are "on the go", walking or in transportation
- they have a disability, can't type with a keyboard
- a cultural thing. I've seen some people in some regions/countries only using the voice messages feature, no text at all and no calls.
This is particularly frequent when the sender client (such as Element) limits the duration of push-to-talk recordings; in that case people typically send me 5 to 15 messages one after another. I've seen some friends (on other protocols/apps) receive 50 voice messages in a batch sometimes, and they listened through them all while multitasking.
I'm not going to petition everyone I meet to type everything out, so I'd like to be able to handle this efficiently on the receiving end.
Potential approaches / prior art
There are two shortcomings I observed that might help with this:
- Fractal resets the playback slider widget (and timecode label) to the beginning when playback stops, instead of keeping it at the end. This makes it hard to know which was the last audio file that was played in a sequence, if you were not actively looking at it.
- Fractal does not autoplay subsequent (i.e. no text inbetween) voice messages. It would be nice if it could, like Element (and others such as Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram if I am not mistaken). If you don't want this to be the default behavior, maybe it it could be an opt-in feature?
I don't need a fancy UI to represent things differently; simply having the ability to autoplay back-to-back voice messages would already be a huge practical improvement, because then I would not have to sit in front of the UI to hit a button every two minutes.