Skip to main content

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Shuffle better (a problem/partial proposal) (Read 7943 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Shuffle better (a problem/partial proposal)

Sometimes the default way to shuffle music bothers me, because it seem not shuffled enough.

Say I choose 3 different artists and I have 10 tracks by "Justin Timberlake", 25 tracks by Britney Spears" and 50 tracks by Madonna and want to shuffle them. By the logical nature of the shuffle-design, I would of course get more Madonna in this playlist rather than Justin Timberlake, but really I would like to hear equal parts of each artist so I'm not getting tired of just Madonna all the time.

I don't know how it would be implemented or worked around easily, but I know that sometimes I would want to shuffle this way on eigher "Artist" or "Genre" and possibly other tags as well.

What do you think?
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

Shuffle better (a problem/partial proposal)

Reply #1
What occurs to me is something that could select an equal number of random tracks by artists (or genres or whatever) you specify and dump them into a playlist. This might be doable with playlist tree mod, I'm honestly not sure offhand.

Beyond that, if there were some way of generating aggregate statistics (most-played artists or genres or whatever) that could then be fed into an autoplaylist or something, maybe that would work. But I don't think there's a way of generating such statistics within foobar2000 at present.

Shuffle better (a problem/partial proposal)

Reply #2
That sounds actually like a viable solution, anyway I'm not into playlist_tree_mod at all. I really would like to, but I never understood the way the syntax works.

Maybe I would miss some of the limited (by random) tracks if I did something like that by the lowest coefficient.

It might even be cooler if it was just implemented as a part of the current shuffle-functions, to make a randomization based on a specified tag, so it would re-play the tracks by Justin Timberlake several times during a playlist (but keeping track of the order like Shuffle does today).

To simplify it, something like shuffling each tag (artist) and afterwards weaving them together would make pretty much up for it. Heck I might even script something like that
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

Shuffle better (a problem/partial proposal)

Reply #3
I guess you would want a shuffle that would first randomize by album or artist. Then compile a playlist from an even number of songs from each artist/album, in your example 10 random tracks from Timberlake, Spears and Madonna. Randomize those 30 tracks and have them as the basis of your new playlist. The remaining 15 Spears and 40 Madonna tracks could undergo the same process. Select the first 15 songs from both the remaining Spears and Madonna lists, randomize them together, and then append them to the initial 30 track mix. Finally append the remaining 25 Madonna tracks to the end of the playlist. In end there would be no Timberlake after the first 30 tracks, no more Spears after 60 tracks and only Madonna for the last 25. I don't know if this is the type of solution you are looking for, but I would be interested in a plug-in that did exactly this if someone had the time and skill to do it.

You would probably get tired of the playlist before reaching the wall of Madonna.

Shuffle better (a problem/partial proposal)

Reply #4
You would probably get tired of the playlist before reaching the wall of Madonna.

You are probably right, but the main intention for this is also to include more artists, so I don't think it would be an issue. But also, the way I listen to music today I get tired of the artist (and possible dupes among it) too.

I'm looking for a one-click solution at most, just to keep it simple  If it was possible (from the top of my head it isn't) to send the entire playlist content with one click to an external program using foo_run, I could probably script it pretty easily.

A better solution to avoid getting tired of a playlist with multiple entrys of the same items, it could maybe be possible to implement a restriction-like behavior to filter out badly rated tracks or something like that in a solution much like the one DocBeard proposed.
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P