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Comment by nandemo | Hacker News Reader

> In-ear headphones that automatically pause music when removed. The details mention using either a proximity detector to discover when the headphones are in the ear, or a strain gauge to detect the pressure of the ear canal.

The general idea is good but the implementation is odd. It should be enough to do like the ipod/iphone, that pauses the music if you unplug the earphones. I don't know if it's a original idea by Apple, but I love it.

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If you're going to talk to someone, the natural action would be to pull the buds out of your ear, rather than pull the lead out. This is why John's idea is different to (and probably better than) Apple's implementation (which is great).

It would even work for giving someone else the buds to hear a song you're listening to. Pauses while you hand them over.

Yeah, but I can't think of two similar actions where it would be difficult to define the expected behavior: sometimes you just take one bud out momentarily to be able to listen to something external and you don't really want the music to stop. The other one is common in teens, when they share one bud with a friend to listen to some track together and the music should be stopped while that bud is not put.

Both are solved by only pausing when both buds are removed (which is the most polite thing to do anyway).

It's good but doesn't work exactly how I would like it to - if you are listening to something on headphones, plug the device into a docking station you get the audio out through the speakers but when you unplug the headphones the audio stops.

Yeah. I often take them out momentarily to talk to someone or do something and having to pull out the player and restart the track would be annoying.

Unless of course it detected when you put them back in and resumed.

well yeah, I'd say of course it would have to resume on re-insertion.

It's a great idea too, imo.

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