After reading the shuffle modes posts there is another feature I'd like. The ability to shuffle by album. For some reason I prefer to listen to entire albums and not leap around like a radio station/juke box. Combining this with most played/most recently played would be the exact feature.

Looking at the new format of the DB dump in Excel this seems like it should be realitvely easy as Album appears to be a DB field.

My goal would be sort by least recently played album in track order.

You can create an album shuffle with the playlist properties (tag the parent "Albums" folder with the "Always Randomize" flag but not the albums themselves), but you can't do an LRP from it at the moment.

yep..exactly. That is how I have my player setup to randomly play albums (with each album playing in correct order). Works fine...except for the fact that the empeg has one friggin lame randomization algorithm...so it always seems to bring the same common albums to the front of the list over and over...and always seems to sort others near the back.

This wouldn't be a problem if I just let the player play through them all, but what happens more often than not is it randomizes a list for me...then I hear the first song from the first album...and I go..."naw, don't want that right now". Rather than having to hit the forward button an unknown number of times to get to the next album..its just easier to hit the down button 3 times...which generates a completely new random playlist for me. then I hear the first song from the first album on this list to see whether or not its good for now...and either go with it...or 3 buttons down...

but curiously...there are a subset of albums which always seem to repeatedly come up as the first album....and some others which never do. So I keep finding myself hitting 3 buttons down and thinking "Blang durnit...I'm heard that one 4 times this week already", and hitting 3 buttons down again and again until I finally get one that MAYBE is new...or at least I'm not sick of it yet...

If they had the least often played or least recently played options for playlist randomization...then stuff would sort out the way I really want it to... Seems to be it would be a simple add to the software. A little change in the OS and a couple extra checkboxes in emplode..

I've never had a problem with the player's shuffling, but unlike dewdman42, I don't restart my "all albums" playlist very often. In fact, I normally save my place in a bookmark when I choose to play something particular.

To omit an album you don't feel like hearing, without stabbing Next repeatedly, you might try a long-press of Source (3) on a Rio remote. If your tunes are tagged in the usual way, this will purge that album from your playlist. It obviously won't work with playlists you've compiled from several albums, but you might find it helpful for those cases it's good for.

but curiously...there are a subset of albums which always seem to repeatedly come up as the first album....and some others which never do.

Which, as far as I'm concerned, is a long-standing bug which should be corrected. So IMHO it's unrelated to your feature request.

An oft-requested feature is a "next album" key, which would be another completely different way of working around your issue.

Harrumph! Harrumph!

Anything with a capacity for 1000's of songs isn't going to be listened to in sequence very often.

Heck, a beta release fixing _only_ this would be sooo worth having.

-Zeke