I'm new to my squeezebox, and not sitting in front of it, but if you can create a random mix of a playlist, then you can easily use tags to exclude individual tracks. I've been doing this for a while because of the sheer number of ipods in my household. My family just inserts semicolon delimited keywords in the 'comment' tag, and then we have iTunes smart playlists which select based on 'comment contains.' You have to be careful that none of your keywords are substrings of other keywords, but other than that, it works like a charm. It is easy enough to construct sophisticated playlists based on tracks which do contain 1 keyword but not another, etc. Tracks I like get my name. Tracks my wife likes get her name in the keyword list. When we go out for a motorcycle ride together, I sync a smart playlist consisting only of tracks which contain both my name and hers in the comment field. You could do the same thing in order to create smart playlists for random mixes.
We happen to use a mac, so I wrote a few Automator actions to aid the process of adding new keywords. The first just adds a new semicolon delimited keyword to the selected tracks. We then have a bunch of automator workflows on the desktop, one for each keyword, so it is super easy to highlight a bunch of new tracks and shove a bunch of new keywords into them. I also wrote an automator action which grabs a random subset of a list of tracks, limited by size, so that it is easy to get a __different__ subset of a playlist every time I sync it, sized for the ipod I am currently syncing to. I don't know why apple made the smart playlists only change over time if you include a selection parameter that is self exclusionary and then check the live update feature. Otherwise, you get the same damn order every time you grab the playlist. Since I've got both lossy AAC and apple lossless files, I'd really like a feature that would tell the slimserver to ignore two tracks with identical track info that are in the same directory, since currently, when playing an entire album, I wind up hearing each track twice, first the lossless form, and then the lossy. Of course, on the cd's which don't have a lossless form, I still want the AAC or mp3 version to be played. Is this functionality possible within the plugin architecture? If so, I'll likely write it. --sam -- ideasculptor ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ideasculptor's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3305 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19855 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
