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[Kolchek]

I'm building media server that I plan to eventually hook up to a whole house audio system.

Along with my "popular" music, I've got a pretty large collection of classical CDs that I need to rip. Many of these CDs contain more than one work, often by different composers. I'd like to rip these CDs so that I have access to the separate tracks on the CD - which is straightforward.

However, when using shuffle playback or a smartlist to randomly pick music I'd like only entire works to be selected - makes no sense to pick the 4th movement of one piece and then play the 2nd movement of something else. But while playing, I also want to be able to see which track (movement) is current and also be able to skip back and forth in the piece between sequential tracks. I figured that couldn't be asking too much ...

After reading a few posts on FLAC files with Cue sheets I thought I might have a solution. For CDs with only one piece of music I might rip a single FLAC file + Cue sheet into a directory. For multiple piece CDs I'd rip one FLAC file + Cue sheet per peice - and I'd experiment with separate directories per piece or see if multiple FLAC + Cue sheets pairs could co-reside in a single directory. I was hoping the "integrity" of a single piece of music would be preserved by the FLAC file itself.

Well, after ripping simple one piece CDs into a single FLAC + Cue sheet, I'm finding that shuffle play happily treats each track in the Cue sheet as an independent "song" that can be picked standalone - not what I want at all. May as well have ripped each track as a seprate file.

Am I missing something obvious? Are there arcane work-arounds classical music folks are using to achieve what I want? Is classical music dead so nobody else even has these issues?

Any help much appreciated.

[Alex B]

Well, after ripping simple one piece CDs into a single FLAC + Cue sheet, I'm finding that shuffle play happily treats each track in the Cue sheet as an independent "song" that can be picked standalone - not what I want at all. May as well have ripped each track as a seprate file.

The cue tracks are supposed to appear as individual tracks, like it or not. Inside the library they don't provide any functional advantage over tracks that are ripped as separate files. Actually, cue tracks have some limitations.

MC is fully capable of playing separate tracks gaplessly in case the recording has seamless track changes. I'd recommend ripping as separate track files unless your really need disc image + cue files for something outside MC. Even in that case you could consider keeping the original disc image + cue files only in a backup archive and converting separate track files for PC playback.

Do you really need to play complete classical works in the shuffle mode?

I would create some static playlists that would contain various complete works in a predefined order.

EDIT

We could request an "Album shuffle" feature. It would shuffle full albums while keeping all album tracks together in the correct track order. I too would have use for such a feature.

[gappie]

yes, an album shuffle could be nice.

but you could already make a smartlist that shuffles whole albums. i use several for my remote.
i a basic form.

[Media Type]=[Audio] ~sort=Random ~limit=5,1,[album],[album artist (auto)] ~a

this plays 5 random albums.


edit:

Am I missing something obvious? Are there arcane work-arounds classical music folks are using to achieve what I want? Is classical music dead so nobody else even has these issues?

i listen to classical, but i leave everything classical or 'concept album' out of my random lists. i guess for small suites it could be nice, but i dont want to get for instance, 3 hours of mattheaus passion in mixed random list.

[Kolchek]

Alex, Gapple, thanks for the responses.

Do you really need to play complete classical works in the shuffle mode?

I would create some static playlists that would contain various complete works in a predefined order.

I was hoping to create a classical DJ style environment on my whole house audio system, randomly rotating through a sub-genre (e.g. Baroque) or a Composer (e.g. Beethoven Piano Sonatas), etc. With home automation control I could even get these "themes" timed to portions of the day.

yes, an album shuffle could be nice.

but you could already make a smartlist that shuffles whole albums.

Thanks, this is helpful.

I was hoping to find a way to do this without using a smartlist as the home automation software packages like MainLobby and CQC don't seem to be able to use Media Center smartlists in their whole house audio playback. I may be stuck with static playlists.

How does one go about requesting a feature like Album Shuffle?