I associate the pause symbol (two vertical lines) with “press here to pause.” I associate the playing symbol (sideways triangle) as “press here to play.”
Tldr: no
If the system was muted, and you saw two vertical lines, would you assume it’s playing or paused?
Just highlighting that you DO associate it as OP says, because you’re not an idiot. It may not be the primary association, but it’s there.
If the system was muted, and I saw two vertical lines I would assume that meant “press here to pause.” The state of “the thing” to me has nothing to do with the symbol on the button.
How would you then, reconsile the the state of "the thing"on system that had individual buttons for functions such as play/pause/fast forward/rewind/record/eject/etc? Would the thing be playing and paused at the same time?
Ah, the old debate of “display current state” vs “display current action”…
“Press this button to do this”
Yes. The button symbol denotes the action/cause, not the reaction/effect.
Yes I understand that but in most software they don’t have seperate play and pause buttons but rather only one which swaps symbols when you click and so for me when I want to know whether it is currently playing I just look at the button.
Generally I just either watch the screen or listen to the audio to know if it’s currently playing, but maybe that’s just me
Speak for yourself.
Tell me you’re Gen Z or Alpha without telling me you’re Gen Z or Alpha.
I take it you never used a tape player or VCR.
Could only have played DVDs and BluRays on a PS2/3/4/5. In which case ❌=⏯️
I think this only applies if the two actions occupy the same space, and change when pressed? If I saw a separate play and pause button, I’d assume play means play and pause meant pause. If I saw only one button for play, I’d probably assume it was currently paused/stopped.
My bad, I should have been more specific in my post. I was talking in the context of software which in most music players has the pause and play buttons occupying the same space. On physical devices such as dvd player I obviously consider the pause button as “to pause” and the play button as “to play”
I think you are referring the button that user interface provides when such operations are executing.
When the file is playing, you want to pause it, then you may press the pause symbol (Two vertical lines) button to pause it, or else press the play symbol (sideways triangle) to continue playback of the file.
To explain why the pause symbol is two vertical lines, and the play symbol the sideways triangle, here’re some history:
the pause button indicates the two rollers beside the read OR write magnet on a tape deck that push the tape up against the head. the single vertical bar with triangle indicates one roller retracted faster play in that direction… basically other than the “play” symbol, which simply means “go” the rest of the symbols are based on the state of the controlling rollers. Record was a red circle, indicating the red shelled “studio in use recording” light outside the door.
The vertical lines represent the sides of frames on a reel. Pause means you are stopped between two frames, play means you are moving through the frames left to right (hence the arrow), fast forward is moving through the frames at some multiple of 1x, and the scene skip button pushes you forward to some preset “hard” frame edge.
On that note, I wonder how many younger Photoshop users have never realized that most of its tools are named after actual tools and practices from the analog times
I remember actually cutting analogue tape and using sticky tape to repair the join when cropping audio in the studio. Now it’s just a symbol of a pair of scissors.
I’m old enough for the rewinding of cassette tapes to be an integral part of my childhood, at least.
Editing was all digital by the time I started taking an interest, though.
That’s a result of people using the “pause” icon to indicate “paused”. And when people tap on the “paused” icon to “play” something, it becomes associated with that.
Blame the UI devs who messed this up.
Thanks for the insight, ElPussyKangaroo
I don’t think we all do.
It may astonish you to learn that many media devices in this wide, rich and varied world are not software applications.
Someone here didn’t record their favourite songs onto a cassette when the radio played them
Definitely not most people, perhaps most people in the youngest generations, but they still do not constitute a majority. In the future possibly, but there are still plenty of people who either still have sound playing equipment with buttons with those symbols on them or have recent memories of owning and operating such gadgets.
What would be the reason? Most media players I use like vlc which is well known has the play as the triangle and pause as ||. Same with YouTube.
Confused the absolute hell out of me when I was very young!
