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[skeeterfood]

Now that ~ based items in smartlists are processed sequentially you can create some really nice Smartlists.  Case in point:

Code: [Select]

-playlistid==14102813 [Track #]==1 ~nodup=[Artist] ~n=6 ~a -[Rating]=<2 ~sort=[Random]

Step by step:
1) Excludes all albums in my "DO NOT PLAY" playlist (christmas, my wife's Country CDs, ...)
2) Limits it to the first track of each album (each track now represents an "album")
3) Removes all but 1 "album" from each artist (randomized automatically)
4) Limits it to 6 "albums" (simulating my old 6 CD changer)
5) Grabs the remaining tracks from each "album" (we now have 6 full albums)
6) Removes all "crappy" tracks from the albums ( rated 1 or lower)
7) Randomizes the list

It's basically like picking 6 random CDs off the shelf, making sure you don't grab more than 1 CD from a single artist, tossing them into the changer, and hitting shuffled play.  With the added bonus of not playing those few tracks on some CDs that you hate

Hopefully someone else finds this useful...

-John

[Matt]

Cool.

[skeeterfood]

Thanks Matt!

Couldn't have done it without the changes to ~ ordering.  Opens up a whole new world of smartlists!

-John

[Marko]

Intersting smartlist.

Tried tweaking it a bit to fit best over here and ran into a problem I can't figure out...

after tweaking, I have this...

[media type]=audio -[album]=radio [track #]==1 ~nodup=[album artist (auto)] ~n=6 ~a -[rating]=1,2

up to this point, all appears to be fine. The album "radio" contains a load of streaming media stations, so that needs to be excluded, and ratings are most definately a work in progress here atm, so I chose to keep unrated tracks but lose any rated 1 or 2.
Now, when I add ~sort=random to the end of the search string, I'm getting images included in the search results. The images are all cd covers that have been tagged with artist/album info, and given the genre "Cd Covers". I've double checked the file properties for these image files and they are most certainly [media type]=image, so, any ideas why they're creeping in here when the ~sort=random is applied?

-marko.

[Marko]

k, it's not ~sort=random causing this, it's the ~a.

When I add that, the images get brought in, despite the media type=audio up the front there.

played some more to see if I can stop it, but I'm losing. Can anyone see where I'm going wrong here?

[Matt]

~a is special because it takes search results and expands them to include more stuff.  That means it's sort of ignoring things that came earlier.

I'm not really sure of any way around that without breaking other things.

[Matt]

Here's one way to do it:

Create a smartilist with the rules, album expansion, but no final media type or rating (or whatever) filtering.

Then create another smartlist that references the first smartlist but add the filters you want.

Need to think about doing this all in one string...

[Rob L]

I still can't believe how much MC does without me really realising it.

I knew smartlists could be pretty powerful, but I've never really had enough time to play around with them.

I'd been getting to the point where technology was defining how I listen to music - mostly these days I'd got to the point where I've got so many albums I don't know which one to listen to, so just tend to leave it on random play across the whole collection, which of course means I lose the coherence of an 'album'.

I'd been thinking for a while that it would be good to just get it to choose a random album for me and play the whole of it.

And of course that's actually quite easy - it's just a much simpler version of John's CD changer smartlist.

Now if only my Streamium could be as intelligent!
(Actually, if my feeble programming attempts pay off, it might well end up with MC rubbing off on it a bit...)

[JustinChase]

~a is special because it takes search results and expands them to include more stuff.  That means it's sort of ignoring things that came earlier.

I'm not really sure of any way around that without breaking other things.

How about putting the [media type]=audio at the end?  will that work?

[dragyn]

That's a cool smartlist. Too bad you can't use them in view schemes.  

[Matt]

How about putting the [media type]=audio at the end?  will that work?

The ~ things always get processed last.  This is because they do special things that need to see all the results before they can work.

The only way right now is to reference one smartlist from another.  This may change in the future, but it's a pretty complicated thing, so not in 10.0.

[Marko]

got it. thanks for the explanation Matt.

[rocketsauce]

That's a cool smartlist. Too bad you can't use them in view schemes.  

You can...kind of.

Create the smartlist. Then create a new view scheme and in the view scheme properties under Step 1: Create View Items add Playlist as the first item and you'll be asked which playlist (or playlist group) you want to use.

Rob