Phrase-by-phrase / verse-by-verse option

I have had app users say they would prefer the highlighting to cover a whole verse rather than move along phrase-by-phrase.
Having spent countless hours fine-tuning it felt a bit like a kick in the teeth (especially since no one has said they prefer it), but I must remain humble and keep the usefulness to end users the priority over my ego!
If that is what most users want I could probably do a hack with Notepad++ to remove all of the 1b, 1c etc. times. (but keep the originals in case we change our mind)
It occurred to me that maybe there could be an option in the settings for the user to choose between phrase-by-phrase and verse-by-verse options.

I think this is already an option in Aeneas synchronization:
image

In my experience, sometimes phrase-by-phrase either is a bit too choppy (e.g. if the translation has a lot of commas), or the synchronization doesn’t work very well (because of the way the language is pronounced, most likely). But in these cases I usually remove the commas (and possibly the semicolons, if relevant) from the list of punctuation used to break phrases. This leads to longer phrases, and mostly complete sentences. I’m wondering if this is what your app users are looking for? Because you can have a verse (or even more extreme, a bridged verse) that has multiple sentences, to have that be selected as one monolithic chunk of yellow text isn’t all that helpful, IMHO. I would suggest at least breaking it down into sentences, so using sentence final punctuation to break it up into phrases: .?! (and possibly :; as well).

Thanks for your reply, I think I didn’t explain what I meant very well.
I meant an option in the app for the end user to choose p-b-p or v-b-v. They already have the option of having text being read highlighted.
I agree with you that it can be too choppy sometimes. Although commas are normally a good indicator of a phrase break there are many places where I wished I could have merged two phrases while fine-tuning. there were also some places where I wish I could have chopped a phrase in half.
It would be great if the ability to add and remove breaks, and even to adjust where they are in the text, not just in the audio, could be included in fine-tuning.

1 Like