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Nested playlists

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mwalimu:
Is there a way to set up playlists and/or folders that will do something like the following:

A folder contains a large number of entries, most of which are individual .mp3 files, but a few are playlists pointing to files in another folder (possibly but not necessarily subfolders of this one).  When the main folder is played on shuffle and it encounters one of these nested playlists, it plays through it in order before going back to the next shuffled entry in the main folder.

I'm not necessarily bound to using nested playlists if the same result can be accomplished another way, such as by having the songs grouped in the playlists located in subfolders to the main folder, as long as it achieves the result of having two or more files treated as a unit and played together in order in an otherwise shuffled playlist.  The point is, it must group the tracks and play them as a unit; any solution that would effectively pull the tracks from the nested playlist (or subfolder) into the main playlist and treat them as individual tracks misses the point.

Searching the forums I found a couple of requests for a way to do album shuffle; in one of them the OP implied that he figured out a solution but didn't provide any details how he did it.  What I'm asking for could be comparable to shuffling a combination of albums and individual tracks.

A few other factoids:  If it matters, I'm using a Sansa Fuze v2.  All of the files in question are .mp3s I will have probably over 3000 tracks in the main playlist with somewhere between 50 and 100 of these groups as described above (most with only 2 or 3 tracks though some will be longer; one I can think of offhand will have 7).  The groups are all consecutive tracks from the same album; I use gapless, album gain, and no fadeover.

I understand there may be no good way to achieve this with Rockbox.  If so I'll have to either re-rip the tracks from the CDs or (if I no longer have access to the discs) open up Audacity and cut and splice them into single tracks, but I thought I would ask here first if there is a way to avoid having to do that.

saratoga:
If the tracks are each in their own folder, then I think the random folder advance plugin might work (although I'm not too sure how it works). 

I'm not certain if M3U playlists are supposed to be able to reference other M3U files, but the idea itself seems ok to me if someone wants to implement it. 

mwalimu:
I suppose that would work, but when we're talking thousands of tracks and >95% are single tracks, it seems like a lot of overhead to have to put each one in its own folder for the sake of the <5% to be played as part of an ordered group.  How much overhead in terms of storage capacity is a lot of folders going to eat up?  Does Random Folder Advance have a limit on the number of folders it can handle?

saratoga:
The overhead will be negligible.

mwalimu:
Okay, I'm trying to read through this, review the documentation, and figure out how feasible this would be.  Something else I neglected to mention earlier, if it makes any difference, is that all of the music files, folders, non-dynamic playlists, and such would be located on their own microSDHC card that I might swap out at times.

That said, here are the potential problems that have come to mind:
 - while creating a folder of each of the groups is reasonable, having to also do it for each of thousands of singular tracks is infeasible; I would have to find or write a program to automate the process;
 - it would be quite cumbersome to maintain when adding/removing tracks or replacing them with better copies, or even to locate them to play, if they're each in separate folders.  I was thinking using Database might be helpful, but then I read Database doesn't play well with auto-change directory;
 - if my guess is correct, auto-change directory plays directories at random rather than shuffling them ("shuffle" plays them once each in random order, whereas "random" chooses one at random each time, possibly the same one it just played) (wrong, see next post);
 - again if my guess is correct, with respect to playlist-related features, it has no ability to work with the larger playlist consisting of the entire set of folders; the only playlist it recognizes at any given time is the dynamic playlist from the current folder (mostly wrong, see next post).

Unless some of my guesses are wrong, this is not looking like a workable solution for me.

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