A random song play function that doesn't repeat too soon

[Drev]

Hello,

Did you know that statistics dictate that in a classroom of 30 people, there is a VERY good chance that two people will have the same birthday.

I have been somewhat surprised that no programmer out there has felt the need to make a 'human factors considered' ramdom music play function.

Here it goes: Assume a large song selection of N songs are to be randomly played. Decide that the random player must not repeat until at least (2/3*N) songs have been played in the playlist. As each new random song is selected, it is compared against the last (2/3*N) songs to see if it is a repeat. If it is a repeat, then select another random song and see if it meets the requirement. When N starts to get small (less than 15) the algoritm may have to be tweaked a bit to make things flow smoothly.

While I am here, I could mention that once the new randon song has been selected, the program could check to see if it is within the current songlist window. If it is, fine, do the required highlighting of the text. If the new song falls outside of the current songlist window, then the songlist window should update when the new song starts with the new song highlighted in the center of the window.

Drev

[Lowlander]

A random that wouldn't repeat is great. I haven't played enough with it to see how MM fares in this area.

When you talk about songlist, do you mean the Now Playing window (or node) or the tracklistings?

[rusty]

Not sure I understand what it is that you're requesting. MM currently has 3 randomization features:

-Shuffle: which causes the player to play in random order whatever tracks are in the now playing queue
-Randomize 'Now Playing' list, which allows the user to randomize the order of songs in a playlist
-Randomize Advanced AutoPlaylist, which is used primarily to create autoplaylists that are different on each occasion

In all cases, unless the user has duplicate tracks in their library, or has manually added a track more than once to a playlist, the track will not play more than once.

Are you looking for some change to these functions? or a new 'Continuous Random Play' feature?

[Guest]

Hi Rusty and Lowlander,

Thank you for your comments to my posting about the random play function.

For starters, a comment: In skimming through some other posts, I can see that some power users would like to have some very powerful (and complicated) features added. It raises the good old issue of complexity and power versus simplicity and ease of use. I think as you get older (I am 45) you find yourself going in the simplicity direction. It is a major issue when it comes to the design of software. One thing that you might want to consider is an enable/disable function for the more complex feaures so that the GUI can remain clean and uncluttered for us bozos. lol

Back to randomization: Shuffle vs. the two randomize options. Very interesting that you mention this, but let me explain my train of thought:

I sort my songs by genre, and I do this by physically placing the songs in directories that have the same name as the genre, 'soft rock', 'motown', etc. This makes it very easy to set the 'genre' tag by selecting all of the songs in a given directory. I typically select a genre of music to listen to with random play. I find it annoying if a song repeats within five songs when my directory for that genre may contain 50 or more songs. Hence my posting with the (2/3*N) etc.

Since I am a lazy bozo, I was vaguely aware of the randomization options but conciously chose to ignore this because my plate is always full. All that I want is to be able to enable the 'shuffle' switch for the player and have my music play ad infinitum without any annoying repeats of songs to soon. (Another lazy bozo example: I could not care less about the 'star' ratings for songs and would never even consider setting those tag options. Someone mentioned someting about 'higher random rotation' for highly rated songs but I simply could not muster the energy to worry about this stuff.)

By the same token, if I am plaing a playlist I want it to be simple, just click on the shuffle button and sit back and listen. Personally, I have no interest in the ability to randomize a playlist (or perhaps a full genre) and have it play ALL the songs in the playlist in a random fashion. I simply don't want songs to repeat too soon, and I don't really care if all of the songs play in the playlist, I just want that (2/3*N) rule to apply. I can wait for your pseudo random number generator to eventually hit all of the songs in my selected genre or playlist.

Well, I hope that verbage helps! I suppose in my ideal world, you would be able to use Word and Word Lite, Excel and Excel Lite, bla bla bla.

I love your program. I think that it just needs a touch of the slickness of the WMP interface (I use WMP 9 Beta, by the way, won't touch the official WMP9) while at the same time staying true to its lean roots and relative simplicity of use, and relaive power for managing those pesky tags and all that. I am enthralled with the volume leveling and the powerful search options.

A final a propos comment: For managing my pictures, I use an older version of Thumbs Plus. (V3.3 I think) A few months ago I downloaded the latest version and found that it had changed so much and had so many features that I was not able to use it effectively and deleted it. I suppose that I am hard to please.

Drev

[Lowlander]

I have been playing with the thought that MM might need to come in a lite version as well, for the people who want simple stuff from it. But than you got the free version, which you could consider the lite version.
Oh well, I hope the program makers can add as many powerful features as possible without making it too hard to operate the program for the simple things. For example having advanced tabs in many parts of the program like in the search right now, could be a solution.