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[slerch666]

I like Play Doctor. I am not saying I like to play doctor...

Anyway, one limitation I would like to modify is the number of tracks it will play. Either I would like to play 100 to 1000 plus tracks or somehow have the option that when this set of 100 finishes, automatically filter in the next 100 tracks when the first set is played through, etc.

Does this capability already exist and I am just not seeing it? Given the number of features in MC, I would no be surprised.

Thanks!

[JimH]

Play Doctor will add more tracks automatically.  You can't set the number of tracks it selects.  It will also learn from your skips.

[slerch666]

Thanks Jim.

Is there a reason why mine would stop at either 100 or 116? It's happened the last 3-4 times I have used Play Doctor. Wonder if I could have screwed up a rule or something as I configured quite a few filters. Nothing seems to say stop after so many tracks though.

[marko]

If you stop playback, then you also stop Play Doctor. The tracks already loaded into playing now will remain, but resuming playback will play only those tracks, without any Play Doctor magic. Could that be what you are experiencing?

If you skip a track, while it is less than 50% played, Play Doctor will modify the playlist excluding tracks it sees as similar to that that you just skipped.
If you let it play, skipping tracks you don't approve of, it should add tracks ad-infinitum, until you press Stop, so, there should always be 100 unplayed tracks in the list. In my experience, I only need to skip at most four tracks near the start of my Play Doctor sessions, and the rest of them are then on the money. I'm a big fan of Play Doctor. It's very good at what it does.

...as I configured quite a few filters.

I think a good tip is to keep the filters as general as possible. This gives Play Doctor as much scope as possible to work with. For example, my stock Play Doctor filters are:

Code: [Select]

[Media Type]="audio" -[Filename]="//" [Last Played]=>7d -p=hidden,recycle [Rating]=>=3So, only audio, nothing with a forward slash in the filename (excludes online streams imported to the library), nothing played in the last seven days, nothing on my 'hidden' or 'recycle' playlists, and finally, nothing rated less than three stars.

Within but a few skips at the beginning, Play Doctor has worked out what mood I'm in and delivers a really good playlist.

Are you running Play Doctor from your desktop in standard view?

If yes...
I set up a global keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Alt+R) that kicks off Play Doctor regardless of whether or not MC has focus. It has worked well for me for a number of years now. If that's something that interests you, let us know and I'll show you how.

-marko.

[slerch666]

Hey marko.

I think that hitting stop may be the key. I generally try to just pause the list but over the weekend or sometimes over night I hit stop. Or my desktop goes to sleep, etc. That makes sense.

I have my filters pretty aggressive as I have a lot of tracks that are instrumental (think karaoke versions) but are all called out differently. Off Vocal, Instrumental, No Vocal, and similar. I also have it filter out certain artists as I generally listen to those when I want to listen to them or they are concept albums that "need" to be listened to in proper order, etc. No Christmas songs, etc.

Thanks for the shortcut tip. That is going to make life a bit easier as well though I usually have access to the machine with the screen on and can just click, anything that can get the music started while I work from home I am game for.

[marko]

Thanks for the shortcut tip. That is going to make life a bit easier as well though I usually have access to the machine with the screen on and can just click, anything that can get the music started while I work from home I am game for.

Follow steps below:

• Close MC (and MC server if it is running)
• Go to your MC installation directory
• You should see a folder there named "Data"... Go into that folder
• Create a new folder here called Custom Resources
  
• Download the attached archive and save the xml file it contains in your new Custom Resources folder
• Launch MC
• Press Ctrl+Alt+R and Play Doctor should kick off.

This shortcut should work regardless of whether or not MC has focus, so long as nothing else on your system has already claimed ctrl+alt+r

Included as an added bonus you may or may not find useful, in MC, select a file, press Ctrl+Alt+D and Windows Explorer will open up at the file location, with the file selected.

These will be preserved as you update MC24.
If/When you upgrade to MC25, you will need to remember to copy the "Custom Resources" folder to MC25's Data folder. MC will not do this for you automatically.

-marko.

[Spike1000]

Code: [Select]

[Media Type]="audio" -[Filename]="//" [Last Played]=>7d -p=hidden,recycle [Rating]=>=3So, only audio, nothing with a forward slash in the filename (excludes online streams imported to the library), nothing played in the last seven days, nothing on my 'hidden' or 'recycle' playlists, and finally, nothing rated less than three stars.

Code: [Select]

-[Media Sub Type]="Audiobook; Podcast; Test Clip" -[Genre]="Christmas" -[Genre]="Holiday" -[Genre]="Child" -[Album]="Christmas" -[Album]="Holiday" -[Genre]="Audiobook; Comedy; Comedy//Spoken; Podcast; Radio" ~nodup=[Hash] ~nodup=[Name] ~nodup=[Filename]
I do things backwards with lots of exclusions [-]. Note. The 'No duplicates'  [~nodup] is ignored, however you try it, which is really frustrating as the initial list of 100 tracks will have the same track 4,5 maybe 6 times which is an utter pain. I do wish this this was looked into and fixed.

Spike

[slerch666]

This shortcut should work regardless of whether or not MC has focus, so long as nothing else on your system has already claimed ctrl+alt+r

Included as an added bonus you may or may not find useful, in MC, select a file, press Ctrl+Alt+D and Windows Explorer will open up at the file location, with the file selected.

-marko.

This is perfect! Thanks marko! This makes getting Play Doctor started close to instant. Love it.

The shortcut for Explorer is nice as well but not something I use often.

[marko]

You're welcome. Glad you're all sorted out.

spike1000,
I really don't know what to say...

If you put your Play Doctor filter into a smartlist, does that return more than 100 files? Looking at it, I would have thought so?
If the "Set rules for files that can be included" is so strict that less than a hundred files are returned, then MC will repeat what it's got until it can satisfy the doctor's 100 file requirement. This is not something I, personally, have ever encountered.

The shortcut I posted above starts Play Doctor without a seed file, then I use initial skips to let it know what I'm not in the mood for, it quickly learns, and plays for hours. My initial filter gives Play Doctor around 15,000 tracks to play with. I have never seen a duplicate entry. My "Variety" option is set to "Some".

Typically, how would you start a Play Doctor session?

-marko

[Spike1000]

Interesting. I did some more testing over the weekend and understand things better.

I (virtually) always seed PlayDoctor with just one track as I want to listen to tracks in the style of xyz when the mood takes me 

So, even though I have a sizeable music collection it appears that the algorithms behind ignore user directives when they struggle to find 100 tracks that match the seed track. I think this is the wrong approach; I feel they should honour user directives and (slightly) relax their criteria instead.

It is not disclosed how Play Doctor works but I feel user directives must take priority. (In an extreme example) I don't want Play Doctor to start playing my 0dB test tones or my audio books (both of which are in my exclusion list) just because it can't make up 100 tracks of Mongolian Nose Flute related tunes. I have the no duplicate modifier set for 3 parameters (hash, name, filename) and it's often not honoured. Play Doctor is obviously 'tunable' as I have 'More variety' selected; maybe this should change internally to 'Lots of variety' when there is a risk of user directives not being honoured? Or possibly they should be a warning message to say 'unable to honour user directives relaxing selection criteria'. I have no issues with tracks being repeated after the initial 100, but the same one 4,5,6 or even more times in the first 100 is not acceptable.

The above is just my thinking, It could be the case that none of the above is true and  Play Doctor simply ignores the modifier section completely. ..  In some very quick testing I don't think this is the case but it does it appear that user directives aren't always honoured (without warning) when specified.

Spike

[Spike1000]

Anyone?

I just created a Play Doctor playlist. The seed song occurs 45 times in the 120 song playlist! Consecutively as well. I do like Devo, but this is toture 

Code: [Select]

-[Media Sub Type]="Audiobook; Podcast; Test Clip" -[Genre]="Christmas" -[Genre]="Holiday" -[Genre]="Child" -[Album]="Christmas" -[Album]="Holiday" -[Genre]="Audiobook; Comedy; Comedy//Spoken; Podcast; Radio" ~nodup=[Hash] ~nodup=[Name] ~nodup=[Filename]
Even this has duplicates

Code: [Select]

[Media Type]=[Audio] ~nodup=[Hash]
Spike

[Matt]

Play Doctor should never have the same file if it was played in the last ten files.  And testing on my machine I see that kicking in and working properly.

Do you have the same files in your library multiple times so that it won't actually be a "duplicate" according to Play Doctor?

How are you starting Play Doctor?

Thanks.

[Matt]

I just found that if you start Play Doctor with a file with no other matching files for the artist or album, it would play the same file over.

I'll make a patch to try to check the genre and fallback to every file after that.

Not sure if that might be the cause, but it won't work well if that's just the only match file it can find right now.

[Spike1000]

I can't seem to reproduce the monster 45 copies of the same song in one playlist. ..  But I've discovered that it's present in the backup I took this morning  Can send that too you if that's any use.

I think that might be another issue (or it could be a quirk of the restore due to sorting) as the same track is in position 56 to 100!!! I think I sorted it and then backed it up so that might explain the positioning but not the number of entries! As I can't reproduce reliably this I'm thinking this may be more of a one off.  I'm more concerned with the regular 4,5,6,or 7 copies of a given track spaced out in a 100 track play doctor play list.

No, I don't have the same file in multiple locations (well maybe the odd one on compilations). The duplicates I see are really the same file, from the same album, from the same location.

I start Play Doctor by right clicking a single track and selecting 'Play (with Play Doctor)'.

Play Doctor should never have the same file if it was played in the last ten files.  And testing on my machine I see that kicking in and working properly.

This is crux of the problem. If I've set a 'no duplicates' directive/modifier there should surely be no duplicates so this rule should never kick in.. . .

I just found that if you start Play Doctor with a file with no other matching files for the artist or album, it would play the same file over.

With a 'no duplicates' directive?

I've played with other directives (ie length of the track) and had play doctor come up with a play list of just 1 track; so other user directives do work as expected (in limited testing)


Spike

[Spike1000]

This is what I'm trying to fix. (Attached screen shot)

Slightly obscure track, right click , play(with Play Doctor). Attached image is sorted by Album, which is where the single seed track came from.

Play Doctor settings

Code: [Select]

-[Media Sub Type]="Audiobook; Podcast; Test Clip" -[Genre]="Christmas" -[Genre]="Holiday" -[Genre]="Child" -[Album]="Christmas" -[Album]="Holiday" -[Genre]="Audiobook; Comedy; Comedy//Spoken; Podcast; Radio" ~nodup=[Hash] ~nodup=[Name] ~nodup=[Filename]
Spike