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[AltonHall]

I'm coming across a weird phenomenon with a playlist I'm trying to create for synching an iPod for use at work.

It's basically a smartlist for randomizing albums. Like, take all files with track # = 1, randomize sorting, then apply the Full Album modifier. The issue is that because this is going to be played in an office environment, I want to remove certain tracks from the smartlist after I get my random albums. For example, take out all the dialogue tracks from something like the Pulp Fiction soundtrack.

Anyway, I created a playlist full of the stuff I wanted removed and tried adding " Not Playlist: Not for work " to the rule bar. It doesn't seem to do anything at all. I don't know if this is because of the Full Album modifier or what.

So then I figured, well I bet I can create a 2nd smartlist with the following rules:
Playlist: Random Albums Not Playlist: Not for work
and that should work.

Well, it does remove the stuff I don't want, but now the playlist isn't randomly sorted at all. As far as I can tell, it's alphabetical by album artist. So now I've run into two mysteries - the solution to either one of which should give me exactly what I want. Any ideas on how to make this work right?

[marko]

The full album modifier is a bit of a pain, because by design, no matter where it appears in a search string, it pulls every file of any description that matches the [album] tag, over-riding any other exclusions in the string.

This means that if your album art happens to be imported and tagged, these image files would also be listed, even if you specified [media type]=audio. ~a simply ignores that and carries on regardless.

I don't think it's possible to get a list of albums sorted randomly like that without using the ~a modifier, which means you can't have exclusions.

You can get close using the ~limit modifier if you know how many albums you want, then you can add your exclusions, but will probably have to accept some form of [album] sorting to keep the albums together.

[media type]=audio ~limit=30,-1,[album],[album artist (auto)] -p="not for work" ~sort=[album]

will give you 30 albums picked at random from your library, minus the "not for work" tracks. your mileage using this approach will be dependant upon the ratio between the total number of albums in your library vs. the number of albums you want in your list results.

-marko.