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[krdavies]

I have a Smartlist made up of all my 5 star tracks sorted by LastPlayed date, so the most recently played are at the bottom of the list and the oldest at the top.

I'd like to create a SmartList from that made up of the oldest 20 tracks for my iPod but I can't find any way of doing this. Limit and Mix both seem to select random tracks from the list, which means I usually end up with one or two tracks I've listened to in the last 24 hours and there are favourite tracks I haven't heard in at least a year because they never make it onto this random list.

So what I'm looking to do is create a SmartList of the first 20 tracks in the date sorted "favourite" SmartList.

Is this possible?

TIA

[c1c9k72]

If I'm getting your question correctly, you've got a playlist that does this: [Rating]==5 ~sort=[Last Played]

To get what you want, you need one that looks like this.  [Rating]==5 ~sort=[Last Played] ~n=20

You could either call up the old playlist, instead of just repeating the variables, but the order is important.  The sort has to come before the limit.

Hope this helps.

[krdavies]

Perfect. Many thanks for your help.

[krdavies]

This has worked perfectly for the SmartList I wanted to create but is there any way of putting it into a Mix command? I've tried

~mix=20,100%,{[rating]==5 ~sort=[Last Played]}

but to no avail. This gives me 20 5 star rated songs but not songs that haven't been listened to for a while, just 20 completely random 5 rated songs.

I'm hoping to use Mix to create a play list of say 50 "new" favourites + 20 I haven't heard for the greatest length of time.

Once again many thanks for your help.

[marko]

If this doesn't quite cut it for you, you'll need to provide a better definition of "new"...

Try something like:
[media type]=audio ~mix=70,50,{r=5 ~sort=[Last Played]-d ~%=50},20,{r=5 ~sort=[Last Played] ~n=20} ~nodup=[artist],[name]

I don't have enough 5 rated songs here for that to work well, for testing I used:
[media type]=audio ~mix=70,50,{r=4,5 ~sort=[Last Played]-d ~%=50},20,{r=5 ~sort=[Last Played] ~n=20} ~nodup=[artist],[name]

Also, check out this post for a more complex ~mix list that you may be able to tweak to your advantage.

-marko.

[krdavies]

The first one reads like exactly what I'm looking for. The only bit I'm not sure about is ~%=50. Would you mind telling me what this actually does?

Many thanks.

[marko]

r=5 ~sort=[Last Played]-d

this part of the rule on it's own would also include tracks returned by the second part of the ~mix statement, albeit, they would be at the bottom, but they would still be there for ~mix to pick from.

adding ~%=50 discards the bottom half of the list, thus eliminating that scenario.

-marko.

[krdavies]

The Mix you supplied is perfect but I think I'm still being a bit thick. I had a look in the help file and it has this as an example of ~%:

"~%=50 "Bob Dylan" returns 50% of all tracks with Bob Dylan in any field."

Although what you've given me works, I can tie up what you've done with the ~% with what the help file says. Is there further documentation on this that I'm missing?

Cheers,

Ken

[marko]

Documentation? Not that I'm aware of, no.

Just create a dummy smartlist and play with it. Use simple examples that produce results you can easily predict to test if you have the right grasp on it. Something like:
[media type]=audio ~n=20 ~%=50

Which returns 10 tracks, as you'd expect. Take the help file example (it's not 100% correct); if you simply typed "Bob Dylan" into the search field, you'd get all tracks with Bob Dylan in any field that's searched by default. Adding the ~%=50 modifier discards half of the the results. In my experience, it's always the top half of the list that is retained.

So, for your ~mix rule:

~mix takes each search in its own right. In the background, it gets the list for each search, picks the specified number of files randomly from each list, and finally shuffles them together to give you your ~mix result.

{r=5 ~sort=[Last Played]-d} and {r=5 ~sort=[Last Played] ~n=20}
The files returned by the second search will also feature in the first search, which could mean you get unwanted duplicates, and as we know that the files from the second search will be at the bottom of the list returned by the first, we can make sure they are excluded by adding the % modifier.

Now, I went for 50% because I was unsure how many 5 rated tracks you actually have. We are only concerned with excluding those 20 files returned by the second search, so, if you are worried that 50% is a little too much, try perhaps 75, or 80%. Perhaps work out what percentage of your 5 rated tracks those 20 files represent and use that figure instead...

play around with it to see how it works. have fun

-marko.

[krdavies]

Thanks for that.  I get the feeling I'm just dipping into the power of Smartlists and this sort of info is incredibly useful.

Once again, Many thanks,

Ken