Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[maliceme]

Attn SmartList Gurus: I want to create a SmartList for a given artist who has, say, 10 albums. I want to limit duplicates such that no two songs from the same album will be played for at least, say, 10 songs. The idea is to try to hear a song from each album before cycling back through the discography. Any suggestions are appreciated.

Bonus points: Same scenario as above, but let's say of the 10 albums, one is a live album and one is a Greatest Hits Anthology. So, the Song "Big Hit" appears on three of the ten albums. How can I avoid this song being repeated more than once in 10 songs?

[broncodan]

I am also interested in something like this - Is there a way to somehow create a smartlist that will display Artists with x number of albums or x number of songs rated >=1 (this is what I am really looking for but if you can figure out artist with x number of records a small change would be easy enough to do).

[rick.ca]

I want to create a SmartList for a given artist...

Building such smartlists is easier than it seems—if you can 'think like the smartlist'...

The rules are the easy part—they generally define the 'population' to be selected from (in this case, an artist).

The modifiers can be more challenging, as they determine how files are chosen. Here it helps to understand the list will be created one step at a time, with each modifier operating on the list resulting from the previous modifier. Modifiers also respect the order of the list, so Limit, Mix and Remove Duplicates operations will result in the file(s) occurring first being retained. With this in mind, it's easier to 'walk through' the process required to get the desired results. Although there may be different approaches to this case, this is one sequence of modifiers that might work for you:

• Shuffle (so the end results will vary on refresh)
• Remove duplicates of [Name] (for the bonus points)
• Sort by [Rating] descending (so the higher rated files are first in the list)
• Remove duplicates of [Album] (the one kept will the first in the list)
• Sort by [Date] ascending (assuming this is what you want)

The resulting smartlist is:

Code: [Select]

[Artist]=[your selection] ~sort=Random ~nodup=[Name] ~sort=[Rating]-d ~nodup=[Album] ~sort=[Date]

...cycling back through the discography.

The only way I've figured out how to do something like this is by using an external script to execute (i.e., play) the smartlist the desired number of times. That's a bit awkward, and it will produce duplicates. I suppose the duplicates could be avoided by setting global variables to indicate a has been selected, then use that to exclude it from further iterations...

[rick.ca]

I am also interested in something like this - Is there a way to somehow create a smartlist that will display Artists with x number of albums or x number of songs rated >=1 (this is what I am really looking for but if you can figure out artist with x number of records a small change would be easy enough to do).

I think you would need to use global variables to do this. Use a technique similar to HOWTO: Generate album ratings using variables (+ track count), counting tracks for each rating value and saving that by album and artist. From these, you can calculate average Album- and Artist-Ratings, as well as having track rating counts from which to calculate things like "number of songs rated >=1". Just as you would count the total number of tracks per Album, you would count the number of tracks per Artist and the number of Albums per Artist.

[maliceme]

rick.ca: I just noted your detailed responses. Thank you, this has gotten me 90% of the way there. Cheers!