Shuffling tracks, by custom criteria (ex, album)

[Pavel Shved]

Jud Craft wrote:
> So, all of my Norton music stops receiving a 50% probability, and
> instead, it takes up 1 of possibly 150 artists/album artists.  Giving
> me a shuffle that gives much more variety in my music.

`Custom criteria' is too complex, i think.  User will have to carefully
decide what criterion to use, will forget to switch it sometimes and
have hence less fun.

What about shuffling by `automatic' criteria?  I.e. `Balanced Shuffle'
option scans attributes of songs in playlist (like artist, album, genre,
year, etc) and, if it determines, that some attribute has a big `peak',
it decreases the probability of choosing songs that have such a `peak'
value.

Of course this algorithm must have certain limits: maximal probability
of a track, minimum playlist size etc.  Due to its automatical nature it
will be careful and won't yield the ideal result Jud wanted to see, but
it will be close to that.

An only flaw is when you have, for example, 50% of collection of `The
best of something` album and the other half has, for example, 2008 year.
 In such case balanced shuffle would work like `honest' shuffle, that
picks every track with equal probability.

I have a sketch of an algorithm doing that and i can prototype it, if
you like my proposal (not a big deal -- yet another TrackNavigator).  I
hope, you're not yet fed by my intent to do something more complex than
usual.

Pavel.