SuttaCentral Voice is currently down.
Server rebooted. Not sure what happened.
Thanks to @ERose for reporting.
4 Likes
Thank you, Ven. @Yodha. 
Here’s a wild idea. Let’s call it…
…
“Ven. Yodha Easter Eggs for Voice Search.” 
Basically, certain key search phrases in Inspire Me would trigger display of associated images:
Anagarika Sabbamitta is away for the holidays and retreat currently, but let’s mull on it for a while and talk in January! 
@Aminah, any quick thoughts about the proposal?
4 Likes
Much thanks! Nothing immediately springs to mind.
2 Likes
Hmm… I don’t know. And as @karl_lew said, not much time to think about it right now. I have to say I really love the Dhamma doodles, I love them a lot! But are they the right thing to attract the visually disabled in the first place? Would it not be rather something for the SC main site?
3 Likes
I have a feature request!! But out of compassion for all the work the SCV devas are already doing, it’s (hopefully) only a small one! 
Suppose that I want to listen to the first five Linked Discourses. I type in SN 1.1-5, click on play, and off I go! But after listening to Crossing the Flood, I’d actually like to meditate for a bit on the sutta instead of immediately continuing to Liberation. Of course, I could simply pause SCV. But I wonder, would it be doable to make a setting so that there is a configurable interval of silence between the suttas? For example, if I choose 2 minutes, then after every sutta there will be two minutes of silence before the next one begins. This way it is possible to do some “sutta meditation”! 
Perhaps as an initial feature (which doesn’t require changing the settings menu!), users can simply type SN 1.1-5, s=2:00 in the search field. SuttaCentral Voice will recognize s= as setting the “silence paramter” to some value in hh:mm:ss (hours : minutes : seconds).
I think the “silence feature” would work especially well if and when SCV allows users to make personal sutta playlists. 
With much mettā 
3 Likes
Thanks for the feature request, Robbie, and also very much for your compassion with the Voice team! 
How big or small it would be to implement such a feature I cannot judge, would rather ask @karl_lew for this. What do you think?
BTW: So nice to have a face in my mind now when seeing your posts here on D&D, Robbie! 
3 Likes
Sure.
I’d rather limit the introduction of extra syntax however–it gets arcane quite rapidly. Would it suffice to simply specify the pause between any two suttas? I’ve noticed the “suttas smashed together” oddity in my own listening and very much agree that even a 2 second pause would be fruitful. We could make that a Setting for “Pause between suttas” with a default of 2 seconds configurable up to any number of seconds you wish (but would any choose 3600 
?).
Would this simple, universal pause setting suffice?
4 Likes
Absolutely! 
And you’re right—best to avoid arcane syntax. 
Thank you!
3 Likes
Anagarika @Sabbamitta, shall we put this into 2.1? It is a Settings change. I’d say 5 for Estimate.
3 Likes
Okay!
I think it could go into the “General” section of the settings.
4 Likes
Robbie, how do you find this?
We didn’t add a customization for the following reason:
Regarding customization, we felt that is best achieved by simply hitting the Pause button on one’s audio player. The newly introduced one-second pause provides ample opportunity to “take a meditation break” between suttas. Automating such a feature as a user preference creates storage challenges on the web server given the large size of the downloaded audio files.
Try it out on the staging server! 
5 Likes
Thanks for the new feature! The one-second pause is an improvement. For me, pausing doesn’t meet my needs, so I’ll keep looking for another way.
Update: succeeded! I just learned some Python commands and can now make my own playlists with customized silence in-between! 
5 Likes
Robbie, the way I solve the need for silence is to meditate longer than the playlist. In this manner the focus of meditation shifts subtly and quietly to the deeper surrounding silence. It’s almost as if the audio playlist places the mind firmly, keeping it connected so that when the silence happens, the immersion proceeds naturally to a diffuse focus absent the need to keep it connected. So I will listen for an hour then continue meditating as needed. I never meditate on what was heard since it is no longer present and no longer relevant. Fascinatingly, with repeated listening to the same playlist, I discovered that insight emerges without need to ruminate on what was immediately heard (! 
!) . In fact, I found that I actually have to restrain myself from ruminating on what was immediately heard in order to stay presently aware of what is seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched, and thought. Verbal processes cease first and those are associated with listening to the suttas.
If the above doesn’t work for you, please do help us understand more about the “two minute” need that you have asked for–others may wish it as well. In particular, the choice of time interval is what would kill our server caches, since some may wish three minutes, others one minute, etc.
(And congrats on the Python!)
6 Likes
Great! I only realized this update on your post due to Karl’s comment. I’m glad you found a way that works for you.
Seconded! 
(I know nothing about it… 
)
3 Likes
Robbie is using Python to glue individual download files together
For those not wanting to learn Python, it is also possible to use audio-visual editing software such as Shotcut to edit audiotracks as needed. I am fascinated by Robbie’s use of Voice recordings. The use of these meditative silences intrigues me.
2 Likes
I’m currently in the numbered discourses (with a lot of short discourses). Usually, I aim to listen to one chapter a day (~10 suttas). But I have noticed that I need some between two suttas: to feel the joy, to listen to the silence, or to the rain and wind outside, to allow understanding to come up by itself. The reason pausing doesn’t work for me is that it’s still doing something (with intention, choices, …), and the way the experience works best for me is if I can let go of all of that and just be in the moment with the suttas and silence.
Would this problem also arise when adding silence do downloaded playlists?
Thanks 
The number of Python commands I know can be counted on one hand!! 
5 Likes
That’s five more than I know!
2 Likes
Ahhhhhhhhh. Yes.
I usually listen to Amy for new suttas, since it decreases the “short sutta catch up gap”. However, that might not work given that minutes are what is needed. Amy is not that much slower.
Unfortunately, yes, since these downloaded files are about 30MB per hour and are assembled on the server. They are transiently cached for immediate re-download and soon deleted, but if ten users each did this in the same time period we’d spike up to 300MB effortlessly, which makes me a bit nervous given that we are allotted a limited amount of disk.
Perhaps the universal consciousness will bubble up a remedy after some time…
2 Likes
@Robbie, it just dawned on me that you’re describing what I’ve read about as interval training, which helps by enhancing the capability to sustain larger spans of aerobic effort. Being a bit pokey, I’m unfamiliar with it myself, but I hear it’s quite effective. Based on my reading of the Wikipedia article, I’m seeing that the precise time for resting is not important (i.e., seconds don’t matter), but that the recovery should be long enough for a respite sufficient to sustain subsequent effort. Notably, the rest period seems to be related to the maximal effort period.
This observation leads naturally to the hypothesis that a pause of minute might be inserted every 5-minutes or between suttas, whichever comes first. In other words, it is a precise interval and would work even for longer suttas such as DN33, which plays at about 80 minutes and would be broken up into about sixteen 5-minute intervals, separated with one minute pauses.
One drawback of the “timed intervals” immediately comes to mind. Segments convey meaning and a rest interval might fall between two segments that are elucidating a single semantic point. It’s the audio equivalent of the “word wrap problem” where we don’t want to chop words in half at the end of a line.
Fortunately, segments are numbered semantically, so we can choose more logical breaking points that match semantic boundaries.
How would an “interval meditation setting” suit your needs? Such a setting would address my concerns about server cache space since everybody would get the same intervals.
4 Likes