The "old-school" method of playing random music is/was to press the shuffle button to select shuffle song or shuffle album. You then selected to play something (such as all music, all music in a genre, or a playlist). That would queue up all of the selected music, but randomised (either keeping all songs on an album together, or totally random). This had a performance hit for large music databases.
Random Play is the "new-school" method. You don't need to mess about with the shuffle option. You select to play random songs, and it adds a bunch of songs. It will keep a certain amount of played songs in history, and you can see a bunch of future songs that have been selected for random play. The exact amount of songs selected and history are configurable (Web UI). This is what happens for me in version 6.5.2: If you press play on Plugins -> Random Mix -> Random Song Mix, that will clear any current playlist, and play the new selection of random songs (automatically adding new songs and removing old songs to manage the length of the playlist). If you go back to Random Mix menu, you should see that it now says "Playing Random Songs" instead of the "Random Songs Mix" option. If you press play again, the current random playlist will be cleared and a new selection of random songs will be selected and played. However, you can still press the "Add" button to add any other music to the end of the current playlist. So for example, you may be playing 1 of 11 random songs, and add an album to the end of the playlist. This would add items numbered for example 12..20. After that, random songs would start to be inserted onto the end again. In the Plugins -> Random Mix menu, you could press Add on "Random Album Mix", and this would start to add random albums to the end of the current playlist. So, at any time, "Play" will create a new current playlist, and "Add" will add to the current playlist. Pressing the power button will retain the playlist and random play mode, so resuming playback would carry off where you left it. Powering off the squeezebox or slimserver would lose the random play mode (although the current playlist will be retained). I think that's a complete braindump of everything I know about the Random Mix functionality. It seems perfectly sensible and intuitive to me - much better than many random play options in other software/hardware. If someone can confirm everything I've written here, and it doesn't already exist in the wiki, I'll add it. However, I don't often use the slimserver built-in random mix function, as I use the more comprehensive options found in Erland's third-party plugins (such as "dynamic playlists"), which work in a similar way, but can be configured to select more-specific music playlists, eg. "music not played recently". Phil _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
