Playlist Properties: Album

I have a weird feeling that this may have come up before as a suggestion....

Many people have been requesting Album-centric features for the empeg. Couldn't marking some playlists as "Albums". Then a "Shuffle Albums" option could be added in the Shuffle menu.

By doing this, you'd get random albums to appear one after another, but the tracks within those albums would play in order.

I'm sure other options and features could be built upon this too.

By doing this, you'd get random albums to appear one after another, but the tracks within those albums would play in order.

Yes, you can already do this. Here's how:

1) Create a playlist called "Random Albums".

2) Tag the "Random Albums" playlist with the "Always Randomize" flag in the playlist properties.

3) Copy all of your individual album into the "Random Albums" playlist as sub-playlists. For instance, you now have playlists named:

Random Albums
.......A Night at the Opera
.......Ray of Light
.......Moving Pictures
.......Dark Side of the Moon
(etc...)

4) Make sure none of the sub-album playlists are tagged with the randomize flag.

Then just turn off shuffle, and play the "Random Albums" playlist. It will shuffle the first level (the albums) but not the next level (the songs within the albums).

My comment would be that doing that with 1000's of albums would take a long, long time, but so would going through all of those playlists, rick clicking and checking a "album" checkbox.

Oh well. :P

Thanks for the work-around.

I think there's a fast way to do it in Jemplode. You take the "Albums" soup view and select/copy all of its albums into your playlist. Something like that. I had instructions posted here recently on how to create an "equally weighted artists" playlist, and it had similar instructions. Let me see if I can find it...

Yeah, here it is.

Just to chime in, this is exactly what I've done and it's not as hard to set up as it sounds. The only catch is remembering to put new albums in the "random albums" playlist. I also exclude "Best Of" albums and a few of the weaker albums that I only like a few cuts from.

I think there's a fast way to do it in Jemplode

No, no, no.
I tried this and discovered it will not do what you want.
All the Jemplode soup views are auto-sorted alphabetically
at the leaf (track) level.
So unless you enjoy listening to your "concept albums" by
alphabetical song title, this method will displease you immensely.

mschrag has mentioned that this alphabetical soup ordering is intrinsic
to his method of handling soups. So until we get a working "sort by track
number" layer here, we're stuck with the tedious method of
cut-n-pasting 1000 albums.

music

OK, here's the workaround to fix scrambled tracks on Random Albums:

1. In Jemplode, cut-n-paste the albums from the Albums soup view into the (Random Albums) playlist
2. Set the (Random Albums) playlist property to "Always Randomize" and "Ignore As Child"
3. Sync
4. Exit Jemplode, start the regular Emplode.
5. Select the (Random Albums) playlist.
6. Select Tools->Ordering.
7. Sync yet again (may take a while, since every track on the player gets marked as dirty, I assume because their refcounts are getting incremented) (NOTE: the tracks themselves won't get uploaded again, so you'll be waiting a few extra minutes -- NOT a few extra hours)

8. In the future you can avoid this by copy-dragging any new album you add into the (Random Albums) playlist. But if you ever get in a hurry and think you may have forgotten a few albums, it's simple enough to blow away the (Random Albums) playlist and start over.

Incidentally, it is now a rather dramatic process whenever I add a bunch of new albums at once.
1. Emplode: Add them in Emplode, since JEmplode can't yet ignore the m3u files I leave in my album directories. (I eagerly await this (seemingly) simple option flag.)
2. Jemplode: Sync again in Jemplode to get my ultra-cool soups (decades, mood-lists-by-genre, etc.) and to do the Random Artist Dance above as well as occasionally a similar Equal-Weight-Artists dance.
3. Emplode: Switch back again to patch the mangled album playlist ordering.

It's THREE times the fun!

/music

But there's still no way to skip to the next "album" without click clicking through every song...

Damn, I haven't been following these threads in a long time.

Bruno

It's come up a few times... Just do a "hate album" long press, and you're all set. It's not ideal, but it'll work.

Matthew

Just do a "hate album" long press, and you're all set. It's not ideal, but it'll work.

Yeah, this one should be in the FAQ.

/me works on it...