Problem with auto-playlist selecting by least recently played

[Danielj]

My intention with the playlist is to show the 5 matching albums that I've gone the longest without listening to. Problem is that one album shows up which I listened to today, and I know there are matching albums that I've gone longer without listening to (confirmed this by increasing album limit). I suspect it's because I didn't listen to the last track of that album, as it's a karaoke version.

I've tried looking at the "Last Played (Album)" stat for all albums and it does display correctly for that album, and if it would have been selected using that stat it would have selected another album, so I'm guessing the auto-playlist filter doesn't use it.

Here's a screenshot showing Auto-Playlist settings I use: Link

Any help on how to make it work correctly is appreciated!

[phred]

I've tried looking at the "Last Played (Album)" stat for all albums and it does display correctly for that album, and if it would have been selected using that stat it would have selected another album, so I'm guessing the auto-playlist filter doesn't use it.

Thanks for including the screenshot. It makes it much easier to see how you've set it up.

If I understand correctly what you're trying to do, you need to have "Last Played (Album)" included as one of your criteria. The way you have it set now will only show albums showing a year of 2019 that have either no rating or a rating higher than 2.5. You have nothing in there to select how long an album hasn't been played. You might have to experiment to determine what works best, but I'd start with
"Last Played (Album) has no value."

[Danielj]

I've tried looking at the "Last Played (Album)" stat for all albums and it does display correctly for that album, and if it would have been selected using that stat it would have selected another album, so I'm guessing the auto-playlist filter doesn't use it.

Thanks for including the screenshot. It makes it much easier to see how you've set it up.

If I understand correctly what you're trying to do, you need to have "Last Played (Album)" included as one of your criteria. The way you have it set now will only show albums showing a year of 2019 that have either no rating or a rating higher than 2.5. You have nothing in there to select how long an album hasn't been played. You might have to experiment to determine what works best, but I'd start with
"Last Played (Album) has no value."

That's not quite what I want to do, so let me try to rephrase it: What I want to do is see the 5 albums of 2019 without a low album rating that I've gone the longest without listening to.

It seems to work correctly for 4 of the albums, but there is one album in there that I listened to today and I know for sure it shouldn't be in there. That's why I looked at the Last Played (Album) stat for all matching albums to see if the chosen albums for the playlist matched the values there, and figured the reason is probably because I didn't listen to the last track of the album.

I'm just guessing but I suspect the auto-playlist filter works something like this with my current filters: sort all tracks by last played -> put all tracks in the album of the first track into the playlist -> look through tracks one by one until there is another track not in the playlist yet

If that's the way it works, recently listened albums where I didn't listen to all tracks won't be pushed to the back of the queue. I imagine with a playlist like this whenever you listen to an album it should go to the back of the queue, and you have to listen to all other matching albums before it appears again.

If the filter would instead use the Last Played (Album) stat to sort, I wouldn't have had this problem.

[boroda]

try this:



install tagging tools plugin:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/h2t08o9562efboi/mb_TagTools_latest.zip/file

go to: tools> additional tagging tools> auto library reports. click 'new preset', select '<empty preset>', tick 'album artist', 'artist', change function for new fields to 'minimum', tick 'last played'.

enter virtual tag function id (eg. 'album_last_played'). click 'flash' button, click 'update preset' button. close report window.





go to: edit> prefs> tags(1)> define new tags. for virtual1 tag enter: $ALR(<URL>,album_last_played)

save prefs.

use in auto playlist 'Virtual1' instead of 'Last Played (Album)'.

[Danielj]

Thanks, but there is no problem with the 'Last Played (Album)' stat. I just looked at that stat to see if it corresponded with the playlist output.

To be clear: The problem lies in the "Limit to 5 albums selected by least recently played" part. It seems to select by tracks instead of by albums. It outputs full albums, but it seems to select by least recently played track, so if there's even a single unplayed track it won't update the album as the auto-playlist function 'least recently played' sees it. This is a problem as I often have a few unplayed tracks: Could be if there's a bonus track or some karaoke versions of songs.

I guess that the Last Played (Album) stat either looks at the last time played of the first track of the album, or the last time any track on the album has been played. Either of these two would be fine for my purposes if I could sort and select X albums using it, but as far as I can see there's no way to do that.

[jl45]

i had a similar problem (although it seems not exactly the same as yours as you state you found no problem with the last played stat) and i found that the issue was with one of the songs which had a last played date/time vastly different to the other songs on the album. I found that the answer was to just listen to this one song from start to finish and the album was removed from the playlist.

So to summarise the last played (album) value appears to be the max(last played) of its constituent songs - right clicking on the album cover and checking the last played value gives a misleading value which is not taken into account by the auto playlist.