Random Folder Advance Weighing

[soap]

Not sure how the random folder advance feature works - I'm assuming the generated list is looked at before jumping, if I'm wrong just inverse the idea:

So the idea is to be able to weigh the probability that a folder gets played.  On my players with large amounts of storage I have the complete discography of many artists - often times an artist will have more albums (and thus folders) relative to my total collection than I want the artist played back daily.

Example: I have 16 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds albums and 4 Black Sabbath albums.  If I don't want Nick Cave to play 4 times as often as Black Sabbath yet I don't want to exclude any Nick Cave albums I could have a text file called "weight25" in the Nick Cave folders.

The way I pictured this working is that RFA jumps to a folder, sees the weight, rolls the dice, if the odds hit it stays, if the odds miss it simply jumps again.  No new cache miss as RFA already breaks cache utilization.

I have $47.98 in my paypal account.  A pittance, but will pay to someone who gets this committed before I leave on vacation June 23rd

[[Saint]]

I believe the reason that this hasn't happened is due to the fact that it is so trivial to create a weighted playlist.

The only obvious downsides to this I can think of are::

A - time and forethought taken to prepare
B - The fact that you would lose the ability to shuffle by album (I gather this is important, else random folder advance probably wouldn't be being used in the first place?)

Edited to add: I'm a little unsure how this would work in the File Browser, as my line of thinking suggests this would involve having to know the weighting of a directory before switching to it.

[Saint]

[soap]

Please do elaborate on how to trivially weigh a random-by-album playlist containing all 350 albums in my main directory.

Indeed, how to trivially weigh a playlist of all 3000 tracks in my main directory even.  Do I simply "insert shuffled" each Black Sabbath album four times? (following my above example)

[[Saint]]

Shit, I thought I had elaborated on the fact that this doesn't meet your requirements in regard to "random-by-album".
Apologies.

In regard to the second question "How would I trivially weight random playback of all tracks?", you've got it exactly. Insert the most desirable directories/albums/tracks/artists into the playlist as many times as you would like to to increase the odds of playback to your liking. You wouldn't need to insert shuffled, as you can shuffle/de-shuffle/re-shuffle during playback.

I just had an additional thought, however. On hosted targets (I assume this is the only opportunity available for Rockbox to use a file system other than FAT32), you may be able to do the weighting via symlinks and then make use of random folder advance, but I add this last part as moire of a thought experiment - its not terribly practical.


[Saint]

[soap]

In regard to the second question "How would I trivially weight random playback of all tracks?", you've got it exactly. Insert the most desirable directories/albums/tracks/artists into the playlist as many times as you would like to to increase the odds of playback to your liking. You wouldn't need to insert shuffled, as you can shuffle/de-shuffle/re-shuffle during playback.

That may be trivial but completely impractical.

If I want to weigh one folder out  of 100 at even a modest 50% I need to manually insert one  folder once, and 99 folders twice.

[[Saint]]

So...every single one of your artist directories is its own, top level, directory?

If not, I'm not sure I understand why inserting 99 folders would be problematic, simply insert the root directory which I assume exists.


[Saint]

[JdGordon]

4th reply restart....

Yeah, thinking about it this could definitely be done - unlikely commited by the 23rd but you can build your own .

I think what needs to happen is each directory will check for a random_folder_advance.txt file which might have some options... weight: 100, skip: false, whatever.

if weight < 100 do the "roll". if weight > 100 add weight / 100 extra lines (i.e increase the chance). It should also take the weight from the parent folder.

How does that sound?

[JdGordon]

give http://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/#/c/841/ a shot!

[soap]

Just got back from holiday, will try this weekend!