Giocoso 3 – The Pro Menu : Clear all global pauses

1.0 Introduction

The last item on the Pro menu deletes the entire contents of the global_pausestatus table.

"Global Pauses" is the mechanism by which, when you pause music playback on Device A, a piece of data is written to the Pro database saying that, 'Device A is playing recording X and has reached Y seconds into it'. The idea is that Device B can then use the Play Music menu, Option 6 to pick up the playback at exactly the same point Device A had reached. If you start playing something in the kitchen, you can continue playing it to conclusion in the main listening room, or bedroom, or garden shed...

Normally, when the pausing device itself resumes a play, it takes care to delete the data about its pause out of the Pro database's global_pausestatus table. If Device A pauses, data is written; if it resumes, data is erased.

If your playing device crashed or was simply switched off, however, this bit of data tidy-up doesn't get a chance to happen -and that means a 'record of a pause' is left in the pausestatus table that really ought not to be there. When you take that Play menu option to resume a global play, for example, you might start seeing devices listed that claim to be in a state of paused play which you know aren't actually in a paused state at all.

If you see spurious devices listed, you could fix that by simply re-launching Giocoso on those devices: every time Giocoso is freshly started, it clears out all possible data about that specific device's paused state. By re-starting Giocoso on Device A, therefore, you cause all data about Device A being paused to be deleted: by definition, a program that has only just been freshly launched cannot be in a state of paused music playback, so this 'clean up on launching' process makes sense.

Sometimes, re-launching Giocoso to clear its paused status is more of a pain than you'd like, however. For example, I sometimes power off virtual machines that were running Giocoso in a paused state and it's quite a bit of faffing around to re-launch the entire virtual machine before finally being able to re-launch Giocoso. In that case, the Pro menu offers Option A: Clear all global pauses which will wipe the entire global_pausestatus table, regardless of what devices are listed there. All of them go, in one fell swoop, regardless of the device(s) involved.

This doesn't mean all your paused devices suddenly spring back to life playing music at once! It's not the fact of them being paused that's being erased, but the record of them being paused that's being deleted. The devices stay in whatever state they're in, but the Pro database no longer knows that they're paused or unpaused. Option A simply 'pops the stack', therefore, ensuring that the pausestatus table is emptied and can start over, from a clean slate.

The menu option returns practically instantaneously, with just this confirmation message:

Note that there's no 'are you sure' prompt: the table is simply wiped the moment you take the A menu option. That's largely because wiping the pause table doesn't really harm anything: if you wanted to re-populate the table with the fact that, say, Device C is actually paused at the moment, you could simply resume playback on Device C for just a moment... and then immediately put it back into a paused state. That will add Device C back to the pausestatus table once more. Until you do that, of course, no other Giocoso client device could ever resume Device C's play.

In Summary:

This is not an option you'll need to use very often (unless you're the kind of person that frequently switches off PCs in mid-paused-play!), but it's there if the Play Menu Option 6 starts listing paused devices that you don't think should be listed and it's a bit awkward to re-launch Giocoso on such devices.