Playing on random

[sammydee]

Hi guys

I'm sure the answer to this question is very obvious, and as soon as somebody points me to the appropriate page in the manual/wiki or whatever I will feel very stupid, but I have looked everywhere for an answer to this question and have not found one.

I used to own a Rio Karma before I got an H140 and put rockbox on it. I prefer rockbox overall even though the original karma's firmware was very good. One thing that the karma had which I feel is missing on rockbox is an option for inserting, say, 50 random tracks into the playlist. The problem is, sometimes I listen to albums, but sometimes I leave my music on random. The only way to do this with rockbox (that I can find out) is to insert all tracks shuffled into the playlist. Unfortunately this results in a 6000 track long playlist and when I turn the player off and then on again, it takes about 30 seconds to load up.

The other option is to limit the size of the playlist to 2000 tracks or whatever, but then I can't insert new albums into the playlist, and it inserts the tracks in alphabetical order anyway, so you only end up with the first 1/3 of the alphabet being inserted.

If there was an option to insert XX number of random tracks, this problem could be quite easily solved.

I hope I haven't asked a very stupid question

Sam

[bluebrother]

You can shuffle any playlist by using the "Reshuffle" entry in the Playlist menu (which can be reached by the context menu of the wps)

[Didgeridoohan]

I don't think that is what he's asking for. If I understand correctly, he is asking for a function that inserts a certain number of random albums or tracks into a playlist. Not how to make a shuffled playlist.

I can tell you right away there is no such function in rockbox, currently. If someone has made or is thinking about a patch that adds this, I don't know about it. Maybe you should make a feature request. (It's in the menu on the left).

[LinusN]

Unfortunately this results in a 6000 track long playlist and when I turn the player off and then on again, it takes about 30 seconds to load up.

Are you sure? That sounds like a nasty bug. Playlist loading should be very fast in Rockbox.

[sammydee]

It varies I suppose.

I was using a three month old build of rockbox until a few days ago and that took around 30 seconds to a minute to load the playlist every time.

I am now using a more current built (Version 12806-070316 - whatever that means!) and it seems to have improved.

Ok, I just timed how long the "loading playlist, XXX% complete" screen takes to reach 100%, with 3869 songs in the playlist. I did it quite a few times and sometimes it took up to 25 seconds just to load the playlist, with about a 40 second total booting time. Other times it took about 10 seconds to whizz through the whole lot.

Not sure why there is so much variation, it seems to take longer more often that it takes shorter... if that makes sense?

Sam

[bluebrother]

I am now using a more current built (Version 12806-070316 - whatever that means!) and it seems to have improved.

It's the revision number of the version control system (subversion, and as it is the revision number it has a leading "r") and the build date. Having the revision number in the build ID makes it possibly easily grabbing exactly that version ouf of SVN.

Have you confirmed there isn't anything else running in background, like dircache / database updating? I suppose this will slow it down quite a bit but I haven't tried myself.

[Lear]

I regularly load a playlist with 3600 entries, and that is pretty much instantaneous. Note, however, this is with a "real" playlist. I think what you're experience isn't really the playlist load, but rather the rebuild of a dynamic playlist, which is something different (and, it seems, rather inefficient in this case, but I'm not that familiar with the internals of the playlist code).

What you should do is to create a playlist with all the tracks you want and then make sure you save it somewhere (select Root menu > Playlist > Save current playlist). Then, when you want to play some random tracks, enable shuffle and load that playlist, and you'll see how fast playlist loading really is.

And if you use bookmarks, you won't even need to enable shuffle before resuming the bookmark.

[sammydee]

Yes it is with dynamic playlists.

I have never really used "real" playlists before, I will have an experiment and see if I like that way better. I'd still like the option of inserting say 50 random tracks though, bu I doubt that will be implemented any time soon, its just a hangover from my Rio Karma days...

Sam