Shuffling tracks, by custom criteria (ex, album)

[Ian Monroe]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Jud Craft <craftjml at gmail.com> wrote:
> A thought experiment to demonstrate the problem.
>
> Imagine you have the following library:
>
> A 300+ song collection of instrumental music (one of those giant
> Norton Musical Anthologies of Western Civilization or whatever) and
> roughly 300-400 songs of scattered artists and albums.  So, nearly
> half your library is from the same album/album artist.
>
> Your 300-400 songs of Everything Else may have a lot of great variety,
> but when you do a shuffle, what's going to happen?  Nearly half the
> time, you're going to get instrumental music.  This is because of
> per-track shuffle, I guess:  every track is equally worthy of being
> played as any other track.
>
> Now, I would love it if I could tell Amarok to shuffle by album
> artist, or by album.  (Note that this is _not_ the same as Shuffling
> Albums, which I think is what Amarok 1.4x did when Shuffle by Album
> was chosen:  that is, randomly picking one album, then playing the
> whole album, then picking another album and repeat.  What I would like
> is still Shuffling Tracks, but by an alternate criteria, such as
> genre, album artist, or album).
>
> For example, I could then click "Shuffle Tracks" - "by Album Artist",
> and on every new track, Amarok would randomly choose between the list
> of Album Artists (or the Artist for songs missing the A.Artist. tag),
> and from there it would randomly choose a song.
>
> 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.
>
> Note:  I don't think this falls under the Bias functionality:  I don't
> want to dynamically assemble a playlist that only has 1% instrumental:
>  I still want to play through my entire collection, I just want Amarok
> to shuffle by a criteria that allows me a more dynamic shuffle
> (dynamic in terms of music content), rather than the randomness of
> pure chance alone, which gives more variety with a less heterogenous
> collection.
>
> (This would mean that yes, on average, your Everything Else songs
> would get played much more often than any song belonging to a criteria
> (album, genre) with a TON of songs.  That's what I'd like -- a
> compensation for the homogenousness of my collection).

I kinda see the difference of the functionality you propose and what
we have. It seems pretty specific to your proposed situation; where
some artists dominant. And you can still use the bias functionality
(see next paragraph). You say "I don't  want to dynamically assemble a
playlist that only has 1% instrumental: I still want to play through
my entire collection". Well there's an obvious contradiction there,
nothing about making your playlist 1% instrumental makes it exclude
parts of the collection.

For instance I have a lot of anime music. So in a purely random mix a
good portion of my music would be anime, but thats not really what I
want, so I set Anime at 10 or 20% (all my anime music is under an
"Anime" folder so I can set it to filter my anime by the filename).
That doesn't sound much different from your situation, and I think you
could easily set things up to be similar. It does mean you need to
decide how much instrumental you want instead of picking random
albums, which is maybe more control then you want. But the end result
can be much the same.

Ian