Comment 5 for bug 347784

I've also seen this behaviour, but it appears to be a little more complex than just not being able to resume. Quite a lot of the last.fm behaviour appears buggy. Apologies if this should have been filed as a separate bug, however I believe it is all related and has the same root cause.

One of the first times I tried to pause and resume a track, I had an error appear saying the appropriate codec could not be found, I didn't get the details I'm afraid but it said something about html content. This has only appeared once so far.

Every time I pause & resume, I get the stop symbol and can't resume playback. From that point on I can't go back to listen to that track. In fact, any attempt to rewind a track, or go back to a previous track also causes this problem.

I have also had this happen once on the last track of a set list, in a way that appeared to prevent RhythmBox requesting more tracks from last.fm. I couldn't begin playing the last track, nor could I scroll down to get new tracks, nor could I go back to any previously listened to songs - any attempt to do so ended up putting a stop symbol next to those songs. In the end I had to select a new station, and then go back to the original station to start listening again.

The fact that the last.fm web player only has stop & skip buttons makes me think that quite a few of the standard rhythmbox behavious need changing or disabling to support this properly. My suggestion would be that when playing from last.fm:

- Previous, repeat & shuffle functions should be disabled.
- Pause should be mapped to stop
- Previously listened to tracks should be greyed out, to prevent users attempting to go back to them.

Mapping pause to stop may be a little controversial (and might be better as an optional setting for last.fm playback). However, since RhythmBox doesn't have dedicated stop or pause buttons I feel it would be an acceptable move, and I for one would appreciate being able to use my keyboards play/pause button with last.fm in the same way I use it for everything else.

And in fact, now I've written this, I wonder if the lack of pause functionality at last.fm expains the codec error too. If RhythmBox is expecting to be able to pause & resume a track, but last.fm instead starts on a new track, I wonder if that could occasionally cause RhythmBox to get confused over what to expect? If last.fm is at that point sending a new track list instead of streaming music, could that explain the codec error?