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[sapnho]

One of the great reasons why listening to music coming from your computer is much better than having a CD player is that the computer can put together random selections of the genre that you feel like listening to at a particular moment.

One of the great reasons we all love Media Center is that it is (by a great distance) the best software package out there. However, sometimes Media Center is being used as the background “engine” with software like NetRemote taking over the front end part. This is especially true when the computer jukebox is a proprietary device in the living room as the music selection will often be done through a PPC or a Simpad like device and not through a keyboard.

Media Center is designed in an open way to facilitate the integration of other applications. However, every now and then a bug will be forgotten and even after many fixes, it will still be there. Even in the latest version which I downloaded and registered last night.

I am talking about the calling up of smartlists through NetRemote. With a setting like (1) songs in a particular genre, (2) time limit 300 minutes and (3) random, you would expect the selection to be random.

And yes, it is perfectly random when you call it up through Media Center.

However, when you call it up through NetRemote it isn't. The same songs will be at the beginning of each sequence.

This is greatly annoying and really sad as the smartlists are one of the most innovative and unique features of Media Center.

I am sure Matt and Jim could fix that easily and Ben (from NetRemote) would be more than willing to help.

The last time I made a plea for fixing the album sequence bug, it took Matt less than 24h to fix it and certainly made quite a few people (like myself) upgrade to V10.

Matt and Jim, please help to fix this bug! Thanks!
 

[Mastiff]

Agreed. A few "please" from me as well.  

[jleerigby]

Have you tried it with the ~sort=[Random] at the beginning of the rule instead of the end.  Following a recent change this does matter now thought it doesn't explain why your rule works Ok in MC.

Just a long shot that's all.

[sapnho]

JLee,

I will give it a try later today but the thing is that within Media Center it is indeed random but when called up from an external application it is not longer.

[sapnho]

Well I just checked if putting random first would make any difference but it doesn't.

Funnily enough the so-called "random sorting" is listed by album name up until track 44, then it has 5 mixed ones, and then it starts sorted by album name again...

This is very strange. Matt, with 236 fixes in the latest count, this one should be an easy one for you!

[marketability]

I dont seem to have this problem (MC 10.90 / NR RC6 / Girder 3.2)

I call my lists via a girder wmessage command with a NR event

I assume thats the kind of setup we're discussing?

[sapnho]

marketability, could you describe exactly how you do it or even mail me your girder/NR files (wom[at]csi.com)?

This is a longstanding issue with the NetRemote family and if you have found a solution to it that would be excellent!  

[marketability]

emailed
I'm not a girder/nr master so don't laugh!!

[marketability]

sorry.... forgot to say
MC 10.0.92
NR .995rc6
Girder 3.2.9

[sapnho]

Thanks! I'll check it out during the weekend (which has already begun in this part of the world...)

[sapnho]

I can now confirm that this bug is not longer. In fact the issue seemed to be with Tonto or NR and not with MC.

Solution: Using the LX... command in NR only produces a non random list. However the mjextman command from MC with girder yields a perfect result.

Thanks to marketability!