How to make favourite songs play more often? Options

[Grand Dizzy]

Like many Foobar users, I have now implemented a ratings tag for my songs (0–5).

It’s nice to see at a glance which songs I like more, but suerly the real point of having a ratings system is to make favourite songs play more often in random playback? This is presumably why everyone has a ratings system?

But I can’t seem to find any way to do this. Surely Columns UI should have an optional "random" script that runs prior to each song starting, allowing the song to be skipped? Then, based on the ratings tag, you can assign your own probability that it will be skipped?

Looking on the forums, the only way I could find to do this is to make a special playlist with multiple copies of favourite songs. There is absolutely no way I would ever consider doing this. It’s messy, crude, unorganised, time-consuming ad horrible!

[ruebe]

maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but check out foo_random_pools
it's a little bit clunky but otherwise pretty great

you might also try foo_skip

[LifeWOutMilk]

I use a slightly tweaked version of the Playlist of Record from this Lifehacker post. Because fb2ks autoplaylist feature doesn't allow for nested playlists you have make a single query to cover those.

Here's a fb2k version of Playlist of Record:

CODE

NOT (%last_played% DURING LAST 13 WEEKS)
OR (%rating% GREATER 3 AND NOT %last_played% DURING LAST 6 WEEKS)
OR (%rating% IS 5 AND NOT %last_played% DURING LAST WEEK)
OR (%last_played% DURING LAST HOUR)

As a single line (which can be copy & pasted):

CODE

NOT (%last_played% DURING LAST 13 WEEKS) OR (%rating% GREATER 3 AND NOT %last_played% DURING LAST 6 WEEKS) OR (%rating% IS 5 AND NOT %last_played% DURING LAST WEEK) OR (%last_played% DURING LAST HOUR)

Basically, ratings of 4 and 5 get the most exposure and everything else tends to show up less frequently.

Edit: I added OR %last_played% DURING LAST HOUR so that the song doesn't disappear from the playlist while it's playing. I tried using DURING LAST 10 MINUTES but that causes excessive CPU usage.

This post has been edited by LifeWOutMilk: Nov 20 2012, 19:23

[Grand Dizzy]

foo_skip

This is exactly what I was looking for.

But how do you generate random numbers?

Without random numbers, it’s impossible to control the probability of songs playing. You can only either make them always play or never play.