The search for weighted playlists

Lork · November 2007

I'm looking for a rather specific feature in a media player. I want to be able to rate songs (which every player lets you do these days) and have the shuffle feature pick high rated songs more often and low rated songs less often. Does anybody know of a player or plugin that can do this?

Burtletoy · November 2007

iTunes does this.

Lork · November 2007

Burtletoy wrote: »

iTunes does this.

Oh, that's cool I guess. It kind of sucks that I have to resort to iTunes to do it, but I guess I'll live.

Moe Fwacky · November 2007

Winamp also has rating, I would imagine that it affects the shuffling, but I don't know for sure.

Lork · November 2007

_______moe wrote: »

Winamp also has rating, I would imagine that it affects the shuffling, but I don't know for sure.

I'm 90% sure it doesn't.

Moe Fwacky · November 2007

Then why even bother having a rating system. I just did a little poking around, and you're right, the ratings have no bearing on the shuffle playback.

Doc Holliday · November 2007

I'm not sure iTunes does this, either, unless it's an undocumented feature. "Smart Shuffle" weights songs by artist/album, not by rating.

What you can do, though, is set up Smart Playlists that group songs by a set of credentials, one of which can be rating. For instance I have "Best of Chillout" which contains songs of genre acid jazz, chill, downtempo, lounge, lo fi, etc. with rating above 3 stars. I also like building playlists off of playcount and last played-- I've got a playlist of "neglected" songs (4+ stars, sorted by lowest playcount, limited to 50 songs).

Szechuanosaurus · November 2007

Yeah, iTunes will let you create random smart playlists based on ratings but won't pick higher rated songs more often afaik. What you can do though, is add multiple rules for a smart playlist so maybe if you say put 'songs rate five star' five times, 'songs rated four star' four times, 'songs rated three star' three times and so on and choose 'match any of these rule' you could trick it into picking tracks with a bias towards higher ratings, perhaps more so if you skewed the ratios even more (put in five star 20 times, four start ten times, three star five times and so on, for example).

Not sure if that'd work or if it just treats duplicate rules as one instance of that rule.

Recoil42 · November 2007

_______moe wrote: »

Then why even bother having a rating system. I just did a little poking around, and you're right, the ratings have no bearing on the shuffle playback.

So you can sort by stars, and instantly hit your favorite songs.

iTunes also uses it AFAIK to decide which songs it's going to put on shuffle/nano ipods, for very large libraries. 5 starred songs are much more likely to be put on the iPod, at least in my experience.

Burtletoy · November 2007

I thought that smart shuffle did work on stars, I guess it doesn't. However in the Party Shuffle mode there is a box you can select to 'Play Higher Rated Songs More Often' and you can select the source music to come from any of your playlists. And the Party Shuffle option can list up to 200 songs so it might be what the OP is looking for.

Echo · November 2007

Doc Holliday wrote: »

I'm not sure iTunes does this, either, unless it's an undocumented feature. "Smart Shuffle" weights songs by artist/album, not by rating.

The party playlist (whatever it's called in the English version) does it.

edit: slow'd

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