I have an observation from using this more. Making the big playlist the first time and then playing it is no problem. But if I shut down the iPod it takes a very long time to reload the playlist on next startup. The screen flickers a message about the % loaded, but it is very slow.
On this iPod I have around 60,000 songs. While I would like to pick randomly from all of them, it is very unlikely I'll actually play more than a few hundred before I change the library. When I add more music I'll want to regenerate the playlist so the new songs have a chance to be included.
I imagine that it is a common situation now that users have much bigger libraries than they are every likely to play through in between updates.
So I've been looking at the files on the iPod. I used 'select' over 'Tracks' to generate the list and chose 'insert random'. This makes the file '.playlist_control', but it is not in random order.
If I start playing, and then 'save current playlist', I do get a full list in random order.
Next I copied this to my Mac and used the unix 'split' command divide into lists of 16,000 songs. These do load quickly, and allow a very quick resumption of 'play' after turning on the iPod.
So, I'm wondering if it would be possible to add any of this into Rockbox? Either the option to generate a random list of all songs, but only keep the first 16,000 (or a configurable number)? Or to generate the list and then split it into a sequence of lists as I did manually?
Thanks for any thoughts...