With the 3000 songs that I have on my Empeg, I wish that I could shuffle through the whole list so that I hear those few songs that never seem to come up. I'm always going to want to switch playlists temporarily, for example when a friend is in the car and he wants to hear a new CD or something. Then the "all" playlist is reshuffled and I'm back to hearing many of the same songs again.

I think it would be cool to have a "shuffle now" option that would shuffle the current playlist and save that ordering. This would operate for when the current shuffle feature is off (which should really be called auto-shuffle since it automatically shuffles a playlist whenever one is selected).

If new songs are added to a playlist that has been manually shuffled, the new songs should be randomly placed after the current song position so that they will be heard too.

Interesting notion.

There's something that Hugo said a while back related to this. He said that the database has been keeping track of which songs you've heard, how recently, etc. The software doesn't do anything with this data yet, but he hinted that it would. For example, having the Empeg play you just the songs you haven't heard for a while.

Perhaps this is the "new shuffle mode" that's coming up in 1.1? If that were the case, would that take care of your problem without needing to store/retrieve the shuffled list?

___________
Tony Fabris

Yes, the time-related shuffle does this sort of thing, but it's only an "influence" on the order of the tracks with respect to time. If it were just ordered by time it'd be a sort and end up being very boring as the order *would* be the same all the time :)

The good thing about it is that it works on the statistical info collected by the empeg in any play mode, so if you just listened to all your beatles tracks straight through then picked shuffle play of the entire unit, you'd be fairly unlikely to hear a beatles track until the very end of the suffled playlist.

1.1 also has bookmarks, which are great for keeping track of where you are in a big random playlist. Before you demo to your friend, just save the current playlist/position in a bookmark. After the demo, you just restore the bookmark and you're where you left off.

Oh, and the playlist/position are preserved over a sync, too. Peter (and everyone else!) have been *very* busy recently :)

Hugo

...does it end world hunger? :-p
-m

...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units

No kidding. That's fantastic, Hugo!

It's neat how, right around the same time Doug316 asks for a bookmarkable shuffle, you're getting ready to release that very feature. You've done that to us more than once now, as I recall. Too cool.

___________
Tony Fabris

Tony, you're totally spoiling my fun! At this rate I won't have anything to announce in 1.1 that you haven't already worked out!

Rob

Tony, you're totally spoiling my fun! At this rate I won't have anything to announce in 1.1 that you haven't already worked out!

Sorry!

But for the record, Hugo did hint at it a long time ago. And you and Hugo could have just kept mum about it until the release. I had no idea- I was just guessing. Umm... Lucky guess?

___________
Tony Fabris

Hugo has a big mouth

Don't give me the credit, I didn't do the work :)

The bookmarks aren't for shuffle (or anything specific) it will just save your current position and the current playlist for later retrieval. It just so happens that it works very well for remembering where you were in a long shuffled playlist when you have to give a demo!

Hugo

Hang on...

I thought the disks were mounted read only except during sync....are you collecting stats in flash?



-Zandr
Mk.I #150
Mk.II #39

I thought the disks were mounted read only

That's true for the partitions where the music is stored. They have an area on the disk that does not have a file system on it which they use for persisting some stuff. No doubt they have all sorts of fiendish integrity schemes to make sure they can recover from a power lose during a write.

__
Unit serial number 47 (was 330 in the queue)...

Correct - hda3 is our persist partition which holds things like EQ, playlists, and dynamic data relating to songs (marks, listen counts, etc - and it's been collecting all this info since about beta10 I think...)

Hugo

Ouch! That could be a *lot* of data.

What else have you been storing?

Paul.

Paul Haigh, 6GB, Blue
Reg: 4120 - Serial 00254

It's not a huge amount, just things like last played time, played count, etc. I think it's less than 32 bytes per track...

Of course, we're also storing all your conversations using a hidden microphone. It's all explained by USB seeming slow and emplode sending all this back to us (muhahahahaha).

Not really, but I'm sure you realise that ;)

Hugo

> Not really, but I'm sure you realise that ;)

There are Americans present, you were correct to clarify that

*duck*

Rob

Thats it, I am sueing for defemation of character unless my empeg ships out tomorrow ;-)

-Cranky American

we got the bombs...

12 gig, green...

Hey... I resemble that statement!

p.s.
Don't send the bombs until all the Empegs are safe!
p.p.s.
Just a joke... you know how those Europeans can't take a joke and we don't want to start in international incident here.

George