A few days ago, my friend Tod said to me, "You know what I'd like to see on the player? I'd like to see it shuffle in such a way so that every artist was equally weighted. That way, just because I've got lots of albums by the same artist, they wouldn't come up in the shuffle more often than any other artist".

A moment's reflection and I realized that it could be done with the current player features. It might be a bit of a pain to set up, but you can do it with playlist properties.



Here's how it's done:

- Create a new playlist called "(Equally Weighted Artists)". Tag it with the properties "Always Randomize", "Automatically Repeat", and "Ignore as Child".

- Under this playlist, create a new playlist for each artist on your player. It must be a new playlist, not a copy of an existing one. On my player, this amounts to about 250 playlists. This would normally be a pain in the ass to do, but there's an easy shortcut so you can do this one in about ten seconds (more below).

- Into each artist playlist, put the loose songs by that artist, copied from the "Artists" soup views. Again, there's an easy shortcut, more below.

- For each of these new artist playlists, tag the playlist as "Always randomize" and "Play 1 track at random". Again, there's an easy shortcut to this, more below.

Now, when you play this playlist, it will give you a randomized playlist with exactly one random song by each artist. On my player, I would be able to listen to about 250 songs before I heard the same artist repeat.



There are some caveats to this:

- You need to have your Artist tag filled out correctly for each artist. I noticed that I've got some classical artists tagged as Lastname, Firstname but others tagged as just Lastname. So I need to fix those up or else they'll show on my artist shuffle twice.

- When that 250-song run is finished, it will simply repeat as-is because of this bug. When you reach the end of the list you have to reselect it so it generates a new shuffled list. Hopefully the empeg guys will fix that bug soon and we'll be able to have it run continuously. But for me, it's not much of an issue because my shuffles rarely get thought 250 songs before I've selected a different playlist for some other reason.

- If you have only a single song by a given artist, that song will come up once every single time you play this playlist. This is essentially the "opposite weighting" of what a regular shuffle would do. But hey, it's exactly what Tod asked for: All artists equally weighted! Be careful what you wish for!



Okay, I promised I would tell you some shortcuts to creating these playlists...

Here's the deal. Doing this in Emplode is a complete pain because when you drag a soup view onto a playlist, it drops only the songs and does not create subfolders. Also, when you group-select playlists in Emplode, they gray out the "Play N tracks at random" option, so I can't easily set that option for all 250 playlists.

The solution? Use JEmplode. The latest "prerelease" JAR file (which has to be downloaded separately because it's not official yet) contains easy ways to do all of these things. You see, I've been badgering Mike about these features over the last few days.




So here's how to do it in Jemplode:

- Do a full install of Jemplode from http://www.jempeg.org/installers-20b11/ .

- Check to make sure Jemplode works (remember, it's ethernet and serial only, and serial requires some configuration tricks to get it to work).

- Grab the most recent JAR file from http://www.jempeg.org/jemplode20.jar and copy it atop the existing JAR file where you installed Jemplode.

- Run it and create a new playlist called "(Equally Weighted Artists)". Tag it with the properties "Always Randomize", "Automatically Repeat", and "Ignore as Child".

- Open the "Artists" Soup view.

- In the right-hand pane, select all artists (click on an artist in the right hand pane then press ctrl-A).

- Select Edit/Copy from the main menu.

- In the left-hand pane, click on the "(Equally Weighted Artists)" playlist.

- Select Edit/Paste from the main menu.

- It may take a moment, but eventually, you'll get a bunch of new playlists under the "(Equally Weighted Artists)" playlist.

- All these new playlists should be selected by default. If not, do the Ctrl-A thing on them.

- Select Edit/Properties from the main menu.

- Change the properties to "Always Randomize" and "Play 1 track at random". Uncheck the repeat and ignore-as-child options.

- Hit OK, it will take a moment to apply this to all the playlists.

- If necessary, scroll down the list and consolidate artists that ended up in two playlists. I had to do it for a few. Not many. Make a mental note to correct those tags later...

- Synch, and try it out.

Ooooo... kick ass. I've was about to whine about this since i got REALLY sick of hearing Crass every 5 minutes. Thanks... good idea.

Excellent work around Tony. BUT, what an enormous pain in the butt!

The player definitely has some shuffle issue to deal with. I am getting a bunch of songs by the same artist far too close together for my own liking. It isn't because I've got a disporportionate amount of material from those artists either.

Re-shuffling can cause this to happen to other artists for instance. On the way back from work tonight is seemed to be an Oasis fest. In 20 songs It hit at least 4 by Oasis. One day on the way to work, in about 10 songs it hit 3 by Bob Marley.

Now, with a true random, there's bound to be cases like this once in a while. But I've got a lot of stuff on my player and quite a few loose tracks plus compilation albums. As has been speculated in other threads, I think something's still a bit fishy. Of course, the ultimate would be a less "random" shuffle that did a little work to make sure things were a little more spread out. There's plenty that can be done to help with the problem, but some stuff could significantly slow down the shuffle process. I'm just hoping for a small compromise that would make things even a bit better - doesn't have to be perfect.

Bruno

My point was not to work around the shuffle-clustering effect, but to simply create a playlist of equally weighted artists.

Now that you mention it, it does happen to work around the clustering effect, too. Hmm.

I left it on this playlist when I drove to San Jose and back this weekend. It was surprisingly refreshing to hear it this way. Very interesting. I recommend folks give this a try if they can. And it's not THAT much of a pain in the butt to do if you use the latest Jemplode. The instructions make it look more complicated than it is. It really only takes a couple of minutes.

Do you mind putting this in the FAQ? I don't have time to do this but it sounds great, and would like to be able to find it later.

Calvin

Oh, I thought your whole purpose of creating the equal weighting was to avoid the clustering. I may try this when I have more time to follow your detailed instructions (thanks again BTW). With JEmplode it sounds easy/painless enough to do.

As an aside...
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I have all my top-level lists set to randomize, but as soon as the player gets down one sub-list, it goes in order. I should report this as a bug... I have Artists A-L, Artists M-Z, Compilations and Downloads lists. In each one of those I then have artist and album lists. All the top lists have the random property (and so do the artist lists). When I play the whole player randomly however, it will pick one of the 4 main lists at random, but will then play the first artist and the first album within the chosen list (ie. the random setting for those lists isn't honoured).
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Hmmm.. I just checked my player and it appears for some reason all the random properties are now OFF for some reason. Very odd. I just fixed everything up and will test this again. If I'm lucky it's working and we can just ignore what I wrote above.

EDIT: Woohoo! Seems to be working. Don't know why it didn't when I last tried it. But now that I think about it, that could have been back with 1.03. Of course I still have to install Jemplode to help me make other lists by dragging from the soup views... (Tony, this inability in emplode has already been flagged as a bug, right? Or at least some feature that should have a way to over-ride or modify the bahaviour of?)

Bruno

Tony,
I was about to complain that I had already mentioned this, but I went back and read my thread and realized it was about as clear as mud. Sorry, I really shouldn't write things like that in a hurry!
Anyway, I've been doing this already for about a month and I figured out a few other cool things you can do.
- Under each artist, you can "weight" songs by creating two playlists, a "favorites" and an "others" (make sure you select to only play one item out of each list) and putting songs you want to play more in your "favorites" and everything else in "others". Then copy the "favorites" folder again. Only one of the three playlists (favorites, others, favorites) will be selected, and then one song out of each of these. Of course your "favorites" has better odds of being the selected folder. I put all songs I don't know in "other" playlists and this causes them do be in the mix every so often and I discover new music I didn't know I had.
- You can also "bind" two songs together (like say "Eruption" and "You Really God Me") by putting them in their own playlist and NOT selecting the options to only select one item. When this playlist is selected, both items will be played (in order if you have "shuffle" off).
I've been really playing with this stuff and have had excellent results. Sorry if this post isn't very clear, I'm just not very good at describing this stuff.

-Jeff

Wow, those are good tips. Especially the bind-together trick!

I knew you could hand-weight the artists by copying the playlists, but I simplified the instructions...