Enhance the Shuffle feature to keep track of what has been played and not play it again the next time I shuffle?
I have a very large playlist of Blues songs. Saturday night is darts and blues night here and I bring up the list and hit shuffle, hoping that the fact there are a few hundred songs is enough to stop duplicates. But the random algorithm could use work because it will invariably play maybe a dozen repeats from the prior Saturday in the maybe 3 dozen songs we listen to. And many songs never seem to play ever. Either make the random algorithm more random or track what was played and don’t play it again until more things in the list have been played? Like record the last played date for each song in the list and then next time shuffle is used, make sure nothing in the new order has a more recent last played than something above it?
Would Smart Playlists help? I keep a couple, each based on a selection of genres, with an additional condition that the tracks mustn’t have been played in the last 6 months.
Yes you can create a playlist or a bookmark that only includes songs that have not been played, or played whatever number of times you specify. Once you go through your several hundred songs, simply modify the criteria in your playlist/bookmark to played twice or three times or whatever. Alternatively, reset the playcount to 0 and start over.
Just wanted to say I use the same approach as the prior commenters. I set my smart playlist to only include tracks from my Favorites and that have not been played in over a month. This works very well using Roon, but also works perfectly in ARC, as all those play counts are maintained in Roon. I’ve been very happy with the results using this method.
Here are the selection criteria for one of my smart playlists.
Genres are selected using ‘Match any’.
‘Exclusions’ is a tag of a few artists I don’t want to hear.
The playlist’s set to shuffle (‘by random’), though I usually ask to shuffle again when adding to the queue.
I didn’t know about that - thanks! I had to add a BluesNight tag to all in the original playlist and then could use that tag in the Smart List.