Shuffling tracks, by custom criteria (ex, album)

[Jud Craft]

> 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.

I apologize; I was unsure of the functionality of the dynamic playlist
option.  It does seem it could be used to solve my problem.

> 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.

Well, the problem is not that it's "too much control", it's that it's
"not flexible enough".  You are quite right I could achieve a good
compromise if I created a dynamic playlist that only had "10%"
instrumental.

But first, that assumes I want to fix ONLY instrumental music.
Secondly, that I think instrumental should only be 10% of the list.  I
don't want either of those; I'd like Amarok to distribute the
probability EVENLY to compensate for ANY overrepresented criteria
(particularly in this case, album artist/artist, or possibly genre).

I have no idea myself that Norton is one album artist out of 150, and
therefore I should tell it to filter "Norton" for 0.67% of the
playlist.  I'd rather I didn't have to do all of that configuring
myself, and just had a "Shuffle Evenly By Album Artist" option or
something like that.  So you see, while dynamic lists do provide the
basic backbone for such functionality, it is not a good user-interface
representation expedient to that purpose at all.

> 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.

Well, my point is, an ideal "Shuffle Evenly by [Criteria]" option
would support different tags besides just artist, and therefore
specific to any situation where there is an
non-perfectly-herterogenous collection, and not just mine.