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[Saucepan]

Yes, I'm too indecisive to figure out which smartlist I want to hear. I want Media Center to decide for me!

Can it be done?

[marko]

Play Doctor?

(make sure nothing is playing, and click on playing now in the tree)

[Saucepan]

No. Play Doctor creates a playlist based on something you choose. I'm talking about Media Center being able to randomly select one of my pre-made smartlists.

Something like this: ~limit=1,-1,[Smartlist]

That of course doesn't work, but that's the idea I'm going for.

[marko]

There is no workaround. Well, there is, it's called Play Doctor, and is designed for precisely this scenario.

Set a search rule under "Set rules for files that can be included" if you wish, then just press the play button.

The rules will be remembered next time, so in theory, this could be a one time only entry. My advice is to keep it as brief as possible. I use exclude tracks played in the past seven days and exclude everything rated less than three stars.

Press the play button on the Doctor's interface, and off it will go, picking tracks at random from your library. If it plays something you really aren't in the mood for, skip it and the Doctor will try not to play those kind of tracks again during this session.

Try it, I think you'll like it. After setting a simple base rule to start off with, next time, all you need to do is go to Playing Now and press the Play Doctor's play button... you do not need to choose anything at all, except to press the play button, of course!

If you want to reduce the workload even further, you could close MC, then browse to the Media Center 16 program folder. In there, you'll find another folder called "Data", go in there, and create a new folder called called "Custom Resources". Extract the file from the attached zip into this new folder, launch MC, press ctrl+alt+r on your keyboard and Play Doctor will kick off. The keyboard shortcut is global, so MC doesn't even need to be in focus for it to work. If ctrl+alt+r is already taken by another application on your PC, just close MC, open the xml file you extracted earlier in a txt editor, change the r to a different letter and save it.

Have fun. Please try my proposal (the "Custom Resources" is entirely optional, but highly recommended) before dismissing it, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

That's how I use the Play Doctor. There is more you can do with it that I don't fuss with... For example, you could use a Genre filter in the 'files to be included' area, then save that 'prescription' for later use. This way, you could have several channels saved for those times when you know what you're in the mood for, but still not sure what to actually play... just pick a repeat prescription from your saved list and let the Doctor sort it out for you!

-marko

[JimH]

Thanks, Mark.  I've added your post to the wiki here:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Play_Doctor

[Saucepan]

Thanks Marko, I appreciate your response, and the file.

Play Doctor is amazing. I'm a huge fan of it, and I know some of the older users much prefer Play Radio. But that's not what I'm going for.

I have a ton of really super specific smartlists already built, and I just want Media Center to select one for me. That's all.

[marko]

No problem Saucepan. As a final shot in the dark, I tried messing around with MC16.exe and the treepath parameter, but I could not get a result for you.

I do not believe that your goal is achievable without the help of the development team, who would need to expose [playlist name] in such a way that it can be used in search or expression strings.

-marko

[brossmac]

I figured it out, but I'm doing it from outside MC.

I have a Windows folder full of shortcuts to some of my favorite MC playlists/smartlists.  I use these with the Executor launcher in order to quick launch playlists from the keyboard.

The basic form of the shortcuts is that the target basically looks like this:

%windir%\system32\MC16.exe /playreplace treepath=Playlists\Smartlists\NAME_OF_MC_SMARTLIST

I have quite a few of them, including ones that are set up to play random albums from certain genres or years.  It's the way I usually start MC most of the time.  (I have commands in Executor that basically open the windows shortcut.)  If you're linking to Playlists and not Smartlists, just delete "Smartlists\" from the path or insert whatever paths coincide with your Playlist tree structure.

I found a batch script that will open one of these shortcuts at random. Open Notepad, paste the following code and save it as "random.bat".  (Be sure to change SHORTCUTS_FOLDER_PATH to the path of your shortcuts folder, in my case it's C:\Users\brossmac\Music:

Code: [Select]

@echo off

setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion

set BatFolder=SHORTCUTS_FOLDER_PATH

set n=0
set /a rand=%random:~-1%+1
for %%f in ("%BatFolder%\*.lnk") do (
  set /a n+=1
  if !n! equ %rand% (
    call "%%f"
    goto :eof
  )
)

Now when I double click that bat file (or use the command I've assigned in Executor) it randomly picks one of those playlists and plays it.

Done!

(P.S.  I know next to zero about batch scripts.  I modded one I found online to open a random image.  If somebody knows a more elegant way to do this please feel free to correct me.)

I guess the bad news is that if you change the name or location of the Playlist in MC you have to change the shortcut target by hand.  But it's something.

[brossmac]

Anybody find this useful?  I thought it was a decent workaround (for a non-programmer...).