I'd like for the player software to eliminate its sometimes annoying clustering.

Well, the thing he was requesting in this thread was something that was deliberately clustered...

If you want the clustering eliminated completely 100 percent, give my "Equally weighted artists" playlist a try. Instructions are here. That playlist is guaranteed not to cluster. It's got other side effects, which just so happen to be the opposite of clustering...

Give us a step by step on what you just created so I can verify if its the same as what I'm thinking of or if it's more useful.

It's a variation on the equally-weighted artists thing linked above. A bit simpler, though.

Okay, the request was that you'd want the player to play small groups of songs that are thematically related. One of the examples given was to play a few random songs from the same year, then play a few random songs from a different year, and so on.

So, the "ThreeFers by Year" playlist creation went like this:

- Open Jemplode, connect to the player.

- In the root of "Playlists", create a new playlist called "(ThreeFers by Year)". Give it the properties of "Always Randomize Contents" and "Automatically Repeat".

- Select the YEARS soup view.

- Click somewhere In the right-hand pane to focus it, then select all of the years in that soup view by pressing CTRL+A.

- Select EDIT/COPY.

- Click on your "(ThreeFers by Year)" playlist.

- Select EDIT/PASTE.

- A whole bunch of new playlists just got created under "(ThreeFers by Year)".

- Click somewhere in the right-hand pane and hit CTRL+A to select them all.

- Select EDIIT/PROPERTIES

- Give them the properties of "Always Randomize Contents" and "Tracks at Random: 3".

At that point, you should be able to synch and play this new playlist. It should work fine, playing 3 random songs from each year. There is one caveat: You have to turn off shuffle on the player itself when you use this playlist so that it keeps the by-year clustering (which was the goal of this request).

The above procedure takes only about 15 seconds to do. The rest of the time is all loading and synching.