Recently, I started looking at my Music Library for albums I had either never played or not played for a long time – using a Smartlist looking at ‘Last Played’ to find the tracks. I was somewhat surprised when the list returned 50+ albums where track #1 matched the criteria, but no other tracks did.
Now I am (probably) an old-fashioned listener who prefers to play whole albums in the order the songs were originally presented so I knew something was not quite right.
So, I did some testing to see if I could find the circumstances where this occurred, and it appears that when I use one device as Controller (either my MC server itself or, say, Gizmo on a tablet) and a different device as Renderer (in this case, MC running as a library client on another PC; I think it's OK with DLNA renderers) the first track played does not update the ‘Last Played’ value. Upon looking at the ‘Recently Played’ smartlist I noticed that it had updated the first track of the previous album I had played on that same Renderer. It only seems to occur when the Renderer is idle – adding additional tracks/albums to an active ‘Playing Now’ list is OK. Similarly, using the same MC instance as both Controller and Renderer is OK.
Both my server and client are Windows 10 1803 and running MC 24.0.55, although it is clear this has been going on a long time, at least back to MC23, perhaps further.
I’ve been using MC for years and never noticed before – never really looked at the Last Played tag – but now I know, it is in my head every time I start playing an album!
Please could someone take a look?