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[mark_h]

Discussing, over the holidays, how Car Radio doesn't currently work when calling smartlists, Jim said the following:

If you will bring it up again in the new year, we'll take a look at it.

So, I'm bringing it up again 

Car Radio is a fantastic shortcut to commonly used playlists, and while it allows us to use smartlists at the top level, any car radio smartlist that calls other smartlists, eg via Playlists fails to work.  This means that Car Radio is essentially hobbled, making it very much less useful than it could be...

Could we get an update to Car Radio so that it works just like all other smartlists do in MC, ie using Playlists rules work.

This would turn a good feature into a killer feature and allow full control and full refresh of the lists at the push of a Car Radio button.

[Matt]

I'm not totally clear on your request because if you right-click a Car Radio button, one of the choices is "Link To Playlist" and you can pick a smartlist.  It seems to work just fine, so I'm just not sure what you're talking about.  Thanks for any clarity you can offer.

[mark_h]

It's the playlist rule that breaks things.

An example.

I have a test smartlist 'Random Track' that plays a single random track.

[Media Type]=[Audio] ~sort=Random ~n=1

I can right click car radio and select the 'Random Track' smartlist and it works.  All the rules are present in the top level.

But now I have a second test smartlist 'Random Track Nested' that calls the first playlist.

playlistid=='Random Track'

I right click Car Radio and select 'Random Track Nested' and it doesn't work.  The Playlist call "breaks" car radio and it returns the same first result every time (some sort of cacheing?)

So Car Radio only works with top level rules.  The moment you try to call other smartlists from a Car Radio button - no go. 

However, some smartlist goals simply cannot be created without calling other smartlists... 

If you still have my library I sent the other day, you can see this in action on nearly all of my Car Radio buttons.  They work on the first press, but because most of them call playlists as part of their rules they break on subsequent presses.  The only way to refresh is to restart MC.

[Matt]

Coming next build:
Changed: Playing Car Radio buttons that are nested Smartlists will reevaluate the files in the smartlist at click time instead of using cached files.

[mark_h]

Coming next build:
Changed: Playing Car Radio buttons that are nested Smartlists will reevaluate the files in the smartlist at click time instead of using cached files.

You are a God to me!