Author Topic: Expansion to Shuffle Settings with more options  (Read 2683 times)

MayorQwert

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I was wondering if we could see an expansion to what is currently available. Right now we have same/different artist bias but I was wondering if for example at the very least we could change "artist" to be a selectable drop down menu where we can specify a field for it to look for same/different of. For example I would love to be able to set a same/different album bias so that I could have it play 2 or 3 songs in a given album occasionally. That or even changing it to year, if you wanted to have it bias towards keeping music from the same time period. A lotta possibilities here!

ThY

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Hello :)

I made a kinda similar post some years ago but it was about a smooth shuffling mode for big eclectic library, by forcing a song with a specific genre to be followed only by other songs with specific genres.

I don't know how hard it would be to make a plugin like this. That being said, i think the best thing would be a sort of "smart shuffling" comparing the end and the beginning of songs to allow smooth transition between random tracks, whatever their genre.
I use a music player app called PlayerPro on Android which i suspect to use this kind of algorithm (or it is pure randomness, i don't know); but the goal is to have the app to detect similar paterns between the end of the current finishing song with the beginning of another (same rythms, same loudness, ...)

MayorQwert

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While great, a smooth transition between tracks isn't exactly what I'm looking for. I'm just wanting to be able to set a bias based on tag contents like I stated. Having it be something you could specify with a drop down would be pretty neat since that way you can work based on your own library and tags. For example my library has almost no genre tags in place but I do have extensive custom tagging and could possibly use that, or like I said I could use album tag so that I can have there be some bias towards grouping a track or two from the same album together, alternative I make heavy use of custom tagging syntax for my specific collection, which is comprised of game music, and I could utilize the tags I have storing the game's developer and publisher to set a bias towards having games developed by the same company grouped together more often. The ability to use virtual tags would amazing since I have a unique circumstance that has me seeing half my library using "Artist" for the developer/publisher and the other half using "conductor" for developer/publisher. I have two virtual tags that unify these into separate "Developer" and "Publisher" tags, which could then be used in this theoretical settable shuffle bias to allow me to get games developed or published by a certain company to have more chance of being together.

Note, the reason for the tagging split is that I have a emulator frontend with music playback support that originally made my library for (arcade music). it has an OSD that isn't configurable so I set the artist to be in the format "Developer (Publisher)" so that it would have that info on their display. This is not a limitation for my other half of my library, so I left the artist tag for those intact rather than changing them all. Luckily with virtual tags I'm able to unify everything in MusicBee and it'd be cool to get a chance to utilize this properly, since the current "artist bias" only really give me the desired behavior with roughly half my library as it currently stands.

MayorQwert

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One important thing for this would be the ability to do album shuffling that can shuffle a few tracks out of an album rather than the whole album all the time. So going back to what I said before about setting a source for "same/different" slider, you could set it to be "album" and it could perform biasing similar to how it currently does for artist but for albums, so you might have some albums where a bunch of tracks play together if you set the bias high towards same, versus if it is more centered you might have only a few tracks from each album at a given time. This would be very nice to get some more variety while not necessarily blowing through a whole album.

This is also better than just simply setting discs to be defined as albums, which can be used currently to break up larger albums, as doing this would allow the tracks that are played together to be random. If you make discs considered albums and let's say you mess with the metadata to define "discs" yourself to split up albums (as I did), then you're going to have some tracks that will always be played together no matter what when you album shuffle. By allowing other metadata to be selected on the same/different bias slider, you can keep your album metadata integrity sound while also allowing for a lot more unexpected playback which is always great!

As I said before though, this doesn't just limit to album shuffling, you can shuffle with bias for anything:
Artist, Album, Composers, year, or even virtual tags like in my case I said before!

MayorQwert

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Another thing I was thinking about shuffle settings. What about the option to set some settings for the playback of album/artist/etc. that you set?

Like for example if you set it to shuffle by album, being able to do like you can with playlists and set a field limiting the amount from that album in a drop-down?

So for example (Items in bold are the options you would select):

Shuffle by <select>:
☐ Shuffle <select> tracks:
     ☐ Limit to <number> <tracks/minutes/etc.> per <select>
              Restrictions: Gap before same <select> can repeat: <number>

When filled out it could look like this:

Shuffle by Album:
☒Shuffle Album Tracks
      ☒ Limit to 10 tracks per Album
              Restrictions: Gap before same Album can repeat: 10

Shuffle by Genre:
☒ Shuffle Genre tracks:
     ☒ Limit to 30 minutes per Genre
              Restrictions: Gap before same Genre can repeat: 1

Shuffle by Virtual1:
☒ Shuffle Virtual1 tracks:
     ☐ Limit to 5 tracks per Virtual1
              Restrictions: Gap before same Virtual1 can repeat: 3

(greyed because checkbox is unselected)

Shuffle by Artist:
☒ Shuffle Artist tracks:
     ☒ Limit to 2 Albums per Artist
              Restrictions: Gap before same Artist can repeat: 2

Thoughts on this?
Last Edit: February 17, 2021, 03:17:24 PM by MayorQwert


MayorQwert

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Just extra food for thought about this.

So a good example of this being handy is like in my case. I want to have around 30 minutes of playtime per album when I shuffle by album, so I broke my albums up into equal segments by disc, just messed with disc tag to have it in segments and set MB to use disc as an album denotation.

Now, if I am playing a whole album this works fine, but if I were to play the album from a playlist then you run into problems.

For example, let's say I have a 20 track album with 3 minutes per track and let's hypothetically say I split it into two 30 minute segments in the middle by using the aforementioned technique.
Now let's say just 7 out of those are favorites, rated 5 stars. I play a favorites playlist of only 5-star tracks but 4 of those are in 'disc 1' and 3 are in 'disc 2'.
So in this case MB would only play either the 4 disc1 or 3 disc2 tracks, when it could easily just play all 7 tracks using the setup in my last post by using either the "10 tracks per Album" or a case of "30 minutes per Album".

Indeed this very problem is one that's currently giving me some headache, as I divided up whole albums and have the very same problem, where some "play by album" tracks may only have 1 track in a given disc with the rest stacked on the other 'disc'.
Last Edit: February 18, 2021, 11:45:18 PM by MayorQwert