Absolutely! 
And you’re right—best to avoid arcane syntax. 
Thank you!
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Anagarika @Sabbamitta, shall we put this into 2.1? It is a Settings change. I’d say 5 for Estimate.
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Okay!
I think it could go into the “General” section of the settings.
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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! 
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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! 
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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!)
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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… 
)
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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.
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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!! 
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That’s five more than I know! 
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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…
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@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.
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Very interesting idea. Would it be possible to switch the pauses on or off without too much trouble?
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Yes. That would be a single checkbox for “interval meditation”. The interval would be “5 minutes listen, 1 minute silence” (or whatever we decide works best). We would not allow interval customization due to lack of resources.
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The idea sounds good to me. But still: would it not double our cache space? One version with intervals, one without? And the same for many speakers and many languages…
And if people listen bilingual the intervals will be different than for monolingual…
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Yes. The concerns are all valid. Fortunately Voice has two kinds of caches:
- segment caches are the ones associated with voices. Segment caches are permanent. They are also large and ideally stored in VSMs for general use on all Voice servers.
- Downloads are generated in the common cache, which is transient. Transient caches are cleaned up regularly and files older than one minute are deleted.
Admins can clear the common cache, but it normally clears itself.
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Ah, finally I understand what it is about with the common caches! I was just wondering what we would build the VSMs for: for a version with pauses or for a version without pauses? But this question is now answered; it’s the version without pauses.
If this solution would suit @Robbie I’d make a new issue for another release.
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It sounds interesting! 
Just completed my “first session” and I feel refreshed and happy!
I will leave this totally up to the SC Voice devas. Python is working unreasonably well, I have some further ideas for that as well (though I will not be able to work with individual segments), so I’m settled for now! (And starting with a Python tutorial to learn some proper commands!) But if others have interest in a SCV interval option, it could be a worthwile new feature. From my very preliminary (N = 1) findings, it works wonders on the mind.
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Much much Mudita!!! 
I think we definitely should try out this feature!
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Here is an automatically generated version of the Kosala chapter with silences in-between the suttas!
I have made a way to automatically generate playlists with customizable silence intervals between the suttas. I’m now writing some basic documentation and exception handling; after I finish that I’ll post a link so anyone who is interested can try it for themselves!
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