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The Audio 'Back' Button Dilema

06 February 2012

Marco Arment, on the iOS Music app’s Previous Track button:

Stop making the “Previous Track” button behave like it does on CD players, where tapping it first brings you to the beginning of the current track, and tapping it again within a short time goes to the previous track. […]

Instead, make it behave just like the “Next Track” button in reverse: always just seek to the previous track.

The buttons are close together and I often hit the wrong one by mistake.

But I use the Instacast app, which skips backwards a configurable number of seconds; thirty by default. When the skip crosses a track boundary, it plays from the bookmarked position in the previous track, or the beginning of the track if no bookmark is set.

The ‘Next Track’ button behaves the same way, skipping forward in time.