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[aaronsama]

Hi all,

I'm trying to create a smart playlist with the following rules:
Include 3000 most played songs
Of those, exclude 100 most skipped

I'm not sure how to do this. Can anyone help?

Thanks,
Aaron

[MrC]

Create a smartlist, sorting by Number Plays (descending), select 3000, sort then by Skip Count (ascending), and select 2900 of them.

~sort=[Number Plays]-d ~n=3000 ~sort=[Skip Count] ~n=2900

You can paste this into Import/Export.

See also:

   http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Smartlist_and_Search_-_Rules_and_Modifiers

[glynor]

There's a few ways to do this, but I'm going to give you the one I find best to implement.

1. Make a new Smartlist called Most Skipped (or whatever you want).
2. Import this rule:
[Media Type]=[Audio] [Skip Count]=>0 ~sort=[Skip Count]-d ~n=100

That's going to give you a list of the 100 most skipped audio files in your Library.  You can modify it if you want to further limit it to only [Media Sub Type] = Music or to exclude certain other characteristics, or whatever. (EDIT: By the way, I added the [Skip Count]=>0 part because otherwise, if your Library doesn't have at least 100 tracks that have been skipped, you could end up excluding things where Skip Count = 0 because it'll want to fill the 100 tracks.  So, you exclude those, and you'll just end up with less than 100 "bad" tracks if you don't have enough "skips" to fill a 100 track list.)  In any case, save that off to the side.

Next, make a separate Smartlist, the one you really want, with this setup:



Obviously, point the second filtering rule at the Smartlist you created in step 1 above.  Then, your second Smartlist, the one you really want, is filtered against the first.  If you need to tweak the "remove the unpopular skipped tracks" logic, then you just modify the Most Skipped list, and it automatically "ripples" to the secondary Smartlist.

You can stack lists on top of lists on top of lists this way (just don't make the references circular or you'll be in trouble).

As I mentioned, there are ways to do this all within one fancy search expression, because your example was reasonably simple, but I find this method to be much simpler to maintain, and easier to write.  Plus, it is more flexible because you can use that "Most Skipped" list as a filter against lots of your playlists.  You can even make special kinds of Smartlists that are essentially aggregates of multiple other lists, and apply rules to the results.  I use these capabilities heavily to build "utility lists" that do things, just like this: make a list of all the tracks that I generally want hidden (the "Master Bad Stuff" list), and then filter my "good" lists against this "Master Bad Stuff" list.

[glynor]

Create a smartlist, sorting by Number Plays (descending), select 3000, sort then by Skip Count (ascending), and select 2900 of them.

~sort=[Number Plays]-d ~n=3000 ~sort=[Skip Count] ~n=2900

You can paste this into Import/Export.

See, MrC was part of the way there the "easy way".

The problem with that, though MrC, is (of course) that your list doesn't have 3000 tracks, it has 2900.

[MrC]

i thought that's what the OP wanted.  Select 3000, "of those, exclude 100...".  Maybe not?

[glynor]

i thought that's what the OP wanted.  Select 3000, "of those, exclude 100...".  Maybe not?

I read it as:

I want a list of 3000 tracks.  I want these 3000 tracks to be the 3000 most commonly played tracks, except I want to exclude any tracks that happen to be in the 100 most skipped tracks in my Library.  The other problem with your way is if the OP wants the sort order to remain "most played on top"... Yours sorts with the least skipped on top, and then the most played (which may not be the same, and isn't with my Library).

[MrC]

The language is a bit loose.

[glynor]

The language is a bit loose.

Agreed.  Well, now he has a few options.

If you just want to do the logic in the exact order you posted, so you'd end up with 2900 tracks, then you can absolutely do that just as MrC illustrated.  You can add as many stacked filters as you want, reducing the list further and further, and you can have more than one sort order defined in a list (so sort, limit, sort, limit, repeat).  If you wanted something a bit more... Nuanced, then my method shows you a good way to go.

I'd also like to point out to the OP that... You may want to reconsider using [Skip Count], at least by itself, as a filter for "bad stuff".  I've gone down that road before and it doesn't really work on its own.  Because tracks can end up with lots of skip counts due to a variety of factors.  If you look at my copy of the Most Skipped List I posted above, it actually reads like a list of some of my favorite tracks.  Look at my ratings:



The very top song in my list, and many of the others there, are also among my most played ever tracks.  If you think about this, of course this correlates!  If you've played a track 3200 times, you've had many, many more opportunities to skip it than a brand new track (or a bad one) that hasn't had very many plays yet.  You may "skip" a song that you like quite often for a variety of reasons.  It comes on and, while you love the song, you're just not in the mood for it, or maybe that Genre, right now.  Maybe you're using the track for some purpose, which ends up making you skip it over and over.  DARE in my example list above, actually has MORE skips than it does total plays, and I know why... Because I used it in a finely-tuned playlist I made for an event a while back, and I played and skipped it over-and-over-and-over trying to find the song that would "fit best" next in the list.

Other things sneak into the list too, for reasons entirely unrelated to the "quality" of the track.  The #2 track in my list, from good old 2 Live Crew?  That's up there in that spot because, for a very, very long time, that song happened to sort to the very top of my "all music" View in MC (starting as the [Artist] tag does with a numeric and solitary "2").  So, if I was testing something in MC, making sure I had a good volume level or making sure playback worked, or whatever, I'd use that song all the time.  Based on the luck of position, right at the top.  It too has far more "skips" than it actually does "plays" (I mostly have that track for novelty value at parties, after all).  I wouldn't say I hate the song, and I certainly don't love it, but does it deserve to be "filtered" in this way?

[Skip Count] can be a valuable indicator of quality, but what you really want to look at may be this combined with other indicators, which is a big part of why I think making the separate "bad song" filtering list may work out best in the end (coming back and tweaking it).  For example, maybe what you really want is the ratio of Skips to Plays (which you can calculate using MC's math() functions), excluding obvious outliers (like those above) and also excluding any track where Rating is 4 or better.

It gives you way more flexibility, without making an search expression that makes your head explode and that only MrC can love.  

[glynor]

I read it as:

I want a list of 3000 tracks.  I want these 3000 tracks to be the 3000 most commonly played tracks, except I want to exclude any tracks that happen to be in the 100 most skipped tracks in my Library.  The other problem with your way is if the OP wants the sort order to remain "most played on top"... Yours sorts with the least skipped on top, and then the most played (which may not be the same, and isn't with my Library).

I should note, I read it this way because the alternative seemed "too easy" to me.  Perhaps not.  Either way, both possibilities are answered.

[MrC]

I like the softballs.

[glynor]

I like the softballs.