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[sbsp2]

Is there a way to mark 2 (or more) sequential tracks from an album such that they are basically treated as one during random playback (for this discussion)?

You know what I mean?  You know when an album has tracks where one just naturally should always be played with the next/prior?  Example:  Judas Priest - The Hellion & Electric Eye, The Cars - Bye, Bye Love & Moving In Stereo & All Mixed Up, etc .. there are a zillion examples one could think of.  It's a bummer when you are listening to a giant mix of albums in random playback mode and a track comes on an you just expect to here the next one from the album (or prior one) because that's how it's supposed to be and you don't get to hear it

I wish the iPods had this feature as well (frustrating at times).

[mark_h]

Don't think this is possible.  I'd like similar functionality based on multi-disc albums etc so that you could random play all discs from an album, eg two disc albums etc

Mark

[bunglemebaby]

I don't think there is any media software available that does this. It would be an awesome unique feature add. I would guess that most people don't think much about this but would appreciate it once they had it. I'm not really sure what the best/simplest implementation would be, so clearly the experts should get on it. 

In the meantime, I believe there are programs that will join two mp3 files together (without re-encoding) to create one file. I know (for certain) that there are programs to do the opposite and split mp3 files into two files without re-encoding. This surely isn't ideal, but would accomplish your end goal. The main hitch that I see (besides time spent) would be track numbers on complete albums.

[sbsp2]

Ok.  Seems odd (like a good opportunity) that no company has resolved this basic 'issue' with players.  If I worked for a media player software producing company, I know I could solve it easily (it's not hard to do, just a challenge for some).  I guess I can only hope some company adds this feature someday (I'd use it, haha).

[rjm]

my 2 bits...

Don't think this is possible.  I'd like similar functionality based on multi-disc albums etc so that you could random play all discs from an album, eg two disc albums etc

Many will disagree with me but I think the answer is to abandon the physical world and to embrace the digital world. This means every disc in a multi disc album should have the same album name and the tracks should be numbered sequentialy from 1.

Is there a way to mark 2 (or more) sequential tracks from an album such that they are basically treated as one during random playback (for this discussion)?

I think this is a rare enough need that it should not be a feature in MC. Especially since it is dead simple to combine 2 mp3 tracks into 1 using a tool like MP3 Splitter & Joiner.

[sbsp2]

I think this is a rare enough need that it should not be a feature in MC. Especially since it is dead simple to combine 2 mp3 tracks into 1 using a tool like MP3 Splitter & Joiner.

Yes it is simple, but really not the answer (to modify the tracks permanently and re-number the entire album). I thought the same (join them), but then I thought this is not the '80s and I shouldn't have to do stupid stuff and accept that software doesn't work as the user thinks it should.

[imugli]

Many will disagree with me but I think the answer is to abandon the physical world and to embrace the digital world. This means every disc in a multi disc album should have the same album name and the tracks should be numbered sequentialy from 1.

I kind of do this.

All Discs have same album name.
Disc# field is used to sort in theater view, so when I bring up a multiple disc compilation I have All Discs, Disc 1, Disc 2 etc.
Disc 1 track#'s are 101, 102, 103 etc
Disc 2 track#'s are 201, 202, 203 etc.
So that when I'm in "All Discs" I can determine what disc each track is from simply by looking at the track number.

WAF is positive which is always my barometer... 

As for the joining suggestion earlier in the thread, MC comes with MediaEditor, which lets you do just that.

[bunglemebaby]

As for the joining suggestion earlier in the thread, MC comes with MediaEditor, which lets you do just that.

I believe that the JR Media Editor re-encodes the files when it operates on them (please correct me if I'm wrong about this). I would guess this is undesirable for many MC users.

[imugli]

You may be correct.

This may sound silly but if I take 2 wav files (or Flac or APE or mp3 or whatever) is there a difference in the quality if I join them and re-encode them at the same quality?

[leezer3]

You may be correct.

This may sound silly but if I take 2 wav files (or Flac or APE or mp3 or whatever) is there a difference in the quality if I join them and re-encode them at the same quality?

Yep, although you won't notice any real quality difference IMHO. (Your milage may vary on this front, it depends on what quality the original files are and the nature of your setup)
Encoding from a lossy format to a lossy format will always entail some data loss however small


Back to the question at hand, this feature would probably be useful to some, but I question to what extent. IMHO, random playback should be just that with no tweaks or second-guessing of what 'should' come next.
If it bothers you that much, I'd simply exclude these tracks from your random playlists, or even play the whole album

Cheers

-Leezer-

[Doof]

I was writing a plugin that took care of this. It actually worked quite well, but I got all hung up on some stupid little detail and then kind of lost interest.

I guess maybe I should dust off the code and finish it.

[sbsp2]

I think this is a rare enough need that it should not be a feature in MC. Especially since it is dead simple to combine 2 mp3 tracks into 1 using a tool like MP3 Splitter & Joiner.

Kind of a pain to do when you just quickly add 1,000~50,000 (a whole library) tracks to Playing Now to play randomly and you have to look thru thousands of tracks to do what you are saying.  It's such a simple feature, I often wonder why companies keep overlooking the need (and we continue to accept it as 'that's just how it is, live with it').

[p7389]

I think this is a worthwhile feature to add. It should be as simple as selecting the tracks in question and just select "treat as sequence / one track" or something like that.

[mark_h]

I'd like to see this extended to sorting so that you could sort a playlist/smarlist randomly but clump same fields together, eg a playlist of 100 tracks sorted randomly but all same artists are clumped together so you get a few tracks of each artist played followed by a few tracks by the next random artist, and so on.

The clumping should work on any field, so you could clump together multi-disc albums for instance.

Mark