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Nested playlists

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mwalimu:
I just experimented with the setup discussed above, and it appears my guesses were wrong in the third and fourth bullets.

My experiment consisted of creating 12 folders for The Beatles album Abbey Road, which has two of these song suites that should be played together in order.  In one folder I put all four tracks from the first (Sun King, Mean Mr. Mustard, Polythene Pam, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window), in another the three tracks from the other (Sun King, Carry That Weight, The End), and the remaining ten tracks went one in each of the remaining folders.  I copied these to player.

Repeat off.  Shuffle off.  Crossfade off.  ReplayGain album.  Auto-change directory on (this was the only change from my usual settings).  I went to the Random Folder Advance Configuration plugin, had to run Generate Folder List, then edited it to delete all folders except the twelve above (the context menu to delete folder tree made this a lot quicker), and clicked Play Shuffled.  Lo and behold, it created a dynamic playlist with all 17 tracks from all 12 folders!  I reshuffled a few times (again using the plugin's Play Shuffled) and it always kept the tracks from the two song suites together and in order, but otherwise randomized the order, which is exactly the behavior I was hoping for.

So basically my last two bullets are mostly non-problems.  There are still a few gotchas, such as if you go to the normal playlist context menu and reshuffle or insert shuffled, it doesn't respect the folder groupings, but I seldom use those features anyhow.  That still leaves the first two bullets, particularly the matter of creating a folder for each of thousands of songs, but the overall approach is looking a little more feasible.  Too bad there's not a way to tell RFAC to treat a folder as if each song in it were in its own folder.

mwalimu:
First bullet solved.  Foobar's file operations makes it easy to create a folder for each file (using tag values to generate the folder name) and move the file into it.  I am told MP3Tag also provides this capability. 

The second bullet is looking easy to resolve.  I will likely keep a "master copy" of the entire playlist with their folders on my computer where I will make any changes, and use a folder sync program to apply updates to the mp3 player.

This approach of having to create a folder per file still feels kludgey when most of the songs are singular tracks and relatively few need to be grouped, but hey, if it works...  The only iffy part that remains to be seen at this point is whether the Random Folder Advance Configuration plugin can handle thousands of folders without blowing any performance or capacity limitations.

mwalimu:
Process complete, and it appears to be a success.  Since I had never actually compiled a playlist of 3000+ of my favorite tracks, that task alone took many hours.  Anyone who has already done this won't need to do what was for me the most time consuming part of the process by far.  Once I had the playlist built, I used Foobar to put each into its own folder except the multi-track song suites, of which all parts of each suite went into one folder.  This was all done on the computer; with the folder setup the way I needed it to be, I plugged in the player and used FreeFileSync to copy the entire set of folders and tracks to the player (which took about 90 minutes; sure, I could have just done a regular Windows copy, but as I anticipate adding, replacing, removing tracks from the favorites over time, this should greatly simplify syncing up what's on the computer with what's on the mp3 player).

The player (running the original Sansa firmware) spent over an hour showing "Refreshing your media" (this normally takes no more than about 30 seconds after adding/removing content from the player) and finally completed.  I shut it off, started it under Rockbox, and it took a few seconds longer than usual to load.  Under RFAC, generated and edited the folder list as described earlier, hit play shuffled (which took several seconds) and I had a playlist of over 3000 tracks, ready to go!

I'm going to run with it a few days, hopefully hitting a few of the multi-track sets, maybe adding some tracks and resyncing.  If all goes well and enough others are interested in doing the same, I can do a cleaner write-up of the whole process.

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