"Player: seek to begin" (seek-begin) vs "Player: rewind" ?

• Aug 26, 2021 - 01:15

I'm trying to understand the difference between "seek-begin" (mapped to the Home key by default, and called Player: seek to begin in the Preferences|Shortcuts dialog) and "Rewind", which has no shortcut key by default but is mapped to the rewind button on the Playback Controls toolbar.
Internally they have quite different implementations, but both seem to do much the same thing, with a strange difference when in loop-mode and where the looped section is not on the first page, in which case "Home"/seek-begin actually force-rewinds to the beginning of the score and ignores the looped section. And Home also causes some additional scrolling if the looped-section is some way down the 1st page (which doesn't quite make sense from the implementation, as "rewind" is the one that seems to explicitly request a position change).
The "seek-begin" seems the less-predictable of the two, yet is the one that has a default short-cut key so I assume users are "used" to this behaviour - is there a good use case for it though? (particularly the case where the looped section isn't on the first page).


Comments

Home doesn't change the playback position at all for me, loop or no loop. nor does it change the selection., It's just a move of the viewport. It's sort of useful, I guess, if you want to take a quick look that the start of the score without actually changing the state of anything. Ctrl+Home is the more useful generally useful command - it repositions the view and selects the first element, so it's more effectively similar to the rewind even if it's technically different. As I recall, until recently, rewind didn't reposition the view, it only reset the play pointer. Not that it does reset the play pointer to, it's not clear how it's really meant to different from Ctrl+Home.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Home should definitely cause a "rewind" if currently playing back. Otherwise it maps to "page-top" which just scrolls to bring the first measure of the first staff into view (I just implemented that for MU4). None of them affect the current selection at all.
Ctrl+Home is first-element which does indeed select the element (and scroll it into view).

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Ok but my question is why do we need seek begin and rewind as separate commands?
Also it's odd that there are quite a number of factory default shortcuts where the same key is mapped to different actions, but the preferences dialog won't actually let you do it with your own shortcuts.
It's also a pain to implement so it always triggers the right action depending on the "mode".

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