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[Jamil]

I have a Smartlist I created to select Electronica music I want to hear.  It combines the genres of Electronic and Industrial.  It looks like this:



Here it is exported:

Code: [Select]

[Last Played]=>3w -[Album]=[Music For Yoga],[Time/-Lapse Volume 1],[Time/-Lapse Volume 2: meditations],[Time/-Lapse Volume 3: ASMR],[Time/-Lapse Volume 4: Sleep Music],[5 Minute Meditations],[20XX Volume I: A Tribute To The Music of Mega Man X /(Full/-Length Edition/)],[20XX Volume II: A Tribute To The Music of Mega Man X],[Future Past: A Tribute Collection],[Syndicate: The Heist],[Stalker: Scenes From A Slasher Film],[Stalker: The Final Cut] [Duration]=>90 [Rating]=>3 -[Album Artist]=[Kraftwerk],[DJ Venom] [Genre]=[Electronic],[Industrial] ~sort=Random ~limit=-1,3,[Album Artist]
This Smartlist works nicely, but it has one major issue I have not figured out how to resolve.  It frequently selects music I have already heard more often than it selects music never before played.  What I wish to do is increase the rate of selection for music never played.  I could do this easily if I could use mix to select from two different Smartlists with a 50% selection rate.  It does not look like mix will support a Smartlist as source though.

Any thoughts to improve my selection criteria?

Thanks.

[Jamil]

I found a fix.  This resolves the issue:



The tricky part of getting this to work correctly was placing parenthesis around the custom rule.  Without parenthesis, it does not work correctly and breaks.

As soon as I added this smartlist, my contents immediately shows never before played selections:



Without this change, this smartlist was almost always selecting the same played tracks.

[marko]

If you hover the mouse just outside the left and right ends of each entry, you will find an interactive area where the cursor changes to a 'clicky-hand'...
These allow you to wrap rules in parens to "OR" them

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=46456.0

[Doof]

That's probably MC's most obscure feature. I don't even see any mention of it in the wiki.

But yeah, you can do the same thing by putting in two separate rules and then clicking in the margin area to the sides of the rules. It should end up looking like this:

[Jamil]

Thanks for the responses.

My Smartlist works perfectly now with a single Add to Playing Now context menu click.  This will add 100 to 300 random selections of music to play.  After all music gets played, I must click Add to Playing Now again to add more content.

If I attempt to queue up more than one set of Smartlist entries for longer play time, I end up with duplicate songs in Playing Now.  This is why my feature request I posted here would help: 

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,125736.0.html

[EnglishTiger]

Jamil - Like all smartlists yours is looking for Tracks that satisfy your rules/criteria, however there is no way that I know of to get a smartlist to ignore any tracks that are sitting in "Playing Now" waiting to be played. Therefore if you re-run the smartlist before all the previously selected tracks are played those un-played tracks will continue to satisfy the rules/criteria - hence the Duplicate Entries you are seeing in the Playing Now list.

[Jamil]

Jamil - Like all smartlists yours is looking for Tracks that satisfy your rules/criteria, however there is no way that I know of to get a smartlist to ignore any tracks that are sitting in "Playing Now" waiting to be played. Therefore if you re-run the smartlist before all the previously selected tracks are played those un-played tracks will continue to satisfy the rules/criteria - hence the Duplicate Entries you are seeing in the Playing Now list.

I know there is no way.  That is why I made the Feature Request.

This thread is my use case.

There is no need to post more for this.

Feature Request.

[marko]

There's an isinplayingnow expression function. Bet you could crowbar that in there somehow. Will look at it over the weekend for you if you haven't sussed it beforehand.

[Jamil]

I never used this expressions.  I cannot seem to get it to work though:



This matched my above custom filter.  It returns no results when used as above.

I also tried removing all spacing before and after the =.  Still no luck.  It looks like the rule does not support this particular expression correctly.  I thought it would just like my conditions I added, but it is not.

I also tried all these variations with no success:

Code: [Select]

[IsInPlayingNow()]=0
[IsInPlayingNow()=0]


[marko]

You need an equals inside the first bracket too

[marko]

I thought you might need to make a library field for it first, but, no... at it's most simple, it's working fine as-is...

[wer]

That's pretty clever, Marko!  And to think a bird did it... 

[Jamil]

Thank you.

Holy heck that was tricky.

[marko]

That's pretty clever, Marko!  And to think a bird did it... 

It's a peregrine falcon. They are stunning creatures.... and so fast too.

I know there is no way.  That is why I made the Feature Request.

This thread is my use case.

There is no need to post more for this.

This is why Media Center is as good as it is. Who knows how many other people would want this? It doesn't matter if it's only you, because JRiver have provided you a means to get it to do what you want. The playing field does have boundaries, but it is huge, and it's not too often you bump into them.

Thank you.

Holy heck that was tricky.

All working nicely now then?

-marko

[Jamil]

All working nicely now then?

I am now able to add more music to queue manually that prevents me from having to do it so often.  This helps.  However, my requested feature would eliminate this manual need.  It helps but automation would be better.

I know many are going with music streaming services.  This is not me (I commented on this on these forums before).  I have a large enough library of all music I want to hear that beats any streaming service currently available.  For nonstop playback of music, streaming has that covered.  MC26 doesn't offer automation for this, so this relatively easy to implement feature would bring more value to the product.

[marko]

For non stop music playback, I use Play Doctor. It is absolutely amazing. Skip tracks you're not in the mood for, and with a half dozen skips or so, it'll play for hours without irritation or intervention. After JRemote in the car, it's our most used feature.

[Jamil]

Again, this is manual intervention that I want to avoid.  I want to simply press play to hear music I want to hear nonstop.  I do not want to manually skip anything, and my Smartlist is configured that I never have to.  My Smartlist has exact logic for the perfect play list.  I do not even know what logic Play Doctor uses for this.  I doubt it is as good as my custom criteria though (otherwise whoever coded it is simply brilliant

[marko]

You should try it and see. You might be surprised. These are our Play Doctor rules....


The trick is to try and keep the scope as wide as possible. We use it via a button in Theater View that doesn't use a seed track, hence the need for initial skipping.

Our Theater View button calls a bat file that does this....

Code: [Select]

@echo off

MC26.exe "/MCWS/v1/Playback/Stop?Zone=-1&ZoneType=ID"
MC26.exe "/MCWS/v1/Playback/SetZone?Zone=Player&ZoneType=Name"
MC26.exe "/MCWS/v1/Playback/PlayDoctor?Zone=Player&ZoneType=Name"

[RoderickGI]

As the questions raised here seem to have been answered, I've posted a response in the Feature Request thread Jamil: https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,125736.msg872232.html#msg872232