Currently, the checkbox that says "Always Shuffle This Playlist" (sorry, I forgot the exact wording) will do a shuffle of everything one-layer into that playlist. This is in fact useful in certain circumstances, and I'm not suggesting that anybody change that.

What would be really cool would be if that checkbox caused everything in that playlist, n-layers deep, to be shuffled. Here's the scenario:

You create a playlist that defines a category. Let's call it "Jazz". You then create a bunch of playlists inside that category, each representing a further subcategorization of Jazz, such as "Oscar Peterson" and "Dave Brubeck". Inside those playlists, you have individual albums (err, sorry, CDs) from those respective artists. Further, you mark the outside "Jazz" category playlist as "Always shuffle". If you hit Play for the Jazz category playlist, you get a random sampling of Jazz from across your whole collection, one track at a time. If you want a specific CD or a specific artist, you can go and select those, and they'll play sequentially, instead of randomly, because the playlist you're selecting in this case does not have the "Always Shuffle" bit set, only the Jazz category playlist containing it does.

Thus, you neatly get the best of both worlds, whatever you want.

Of course, this doesn't work today, because the shuffling is done at the top level of the playlist, not throughout the depths of the playlist, so you end up with random albums or random artists but not random tracks.

Wouldn't it be cool, though?


jester
Sunnyvale, CA
MkI / 20GB / Blue / SN00309