[anotherscott]

I am new to XBMC, so I apologize for any naivete I may exhibit.

I have installed XBMC on my jailbroken iPad, strictly for the purpose of playing music from my portable Seagate GoFlex Satellite wifi drive (so I can drive with 500 gb of music instead of 32 or whatever). It plays fine, so far so good! But I have two questions:

1. I can see that each song is displayed with a rating (stars) area... even nice and big if I hit the little "Now Playing" button... but what I can't seem to find is a way to tap anywhere to actually assign a rating. Is there any way I can rate a song while playing it in XBMC?

2. Is there a way to set it to continue to play in the background, i.e. so I can switch to my GPS navigation program without cutting off the song that XBMC is playing?

Thanks for any guidance!

[Memphiz]

point 2. is possible (depends on your used version) ... just look in the multitask bar and swipe to the left ... it should show the paused playback of xbmc and should allow you to continue playback while not having xbmc in the foreground ...

[anotherscott]

point 2. is possible (depends on your used version) ... just look in the multitask bar and swipe to the left ... it should show the paused playback of xbmc and should allow you to continue playback while not having xbmc in the foreground ...

Thanks for the tip. It's a partial solution. It does work as you describe, but the music switches off again every time I switch in or out of XBMC. Is there anyway to make it default to keep playing? My non-jailbreak players do. Since this is to be used while driving, I am looking to keep operation/distraction to a minimum.

(Though getting back to my other question, my only real reason for wanting to use this was going to be for the possibility of rating music. If that can't be done, I could just as well stick with one of the other standard players I have, and then the background playback issue is moot.)

[anotherscott]

Okay, I found that if I run XBMC on the iPad and run xbmcRemote on my iPhone, i can hit the "i" button on the iPhone app's screen, and it will bring up a "Song Information" window on the iPad, from which I can rate the song. But as soon as I close the Info window on the iPad, the rating disappears! Can anyone shed any light on this?

Also, I figure there must be a way to bring the Info window up right from within the XBMC app in the iPad itself, it would be really weird if the only way to invoke that window was from another device, but beats me if I can figure out how to do it. Anyone?

[Memphiz]

Seems there is no touch action bound to that action. Did you try the touched skin already?

[anotherscott]

Seems there is no touch action bound to that action. Did you try the touched skin already?

Being new to all this... no, I did not try any alternate skins to the default. (In fact, I don't yet know where to find them or how to install them!)

[anotherscott]

I think the issue of rating songs stored on the goflex satellite is that, when used over wifi, it might be a read-only device, and the ratings need to be written back to where the music file is located. That would explain why it looks like I can rate a song, but the rating doesn't "take." (Can anyone confirm?)

[anotherscott]

point 2. is possible (depends on your used version) ... just look in the multitask bar and swipe to the left ... it should show the paused playback of xbmc and should allow you to continue playback while not having xbmc in the foreground ...

Thanks for the tip. It's a partial solution. It does work as you describe, but the music switches off again every time I switch in or out of XBMC.

Well it did work that way. Not today. I don't know what's changed, but when I swipe to the left, instead of continuing what I was just playing in the XBMC app, it continues what I played earlier in the standard Music app. Hmmph!