Out of curiosity, why do people have copies of the same song?

We don't. Maybe I should be a bit more clear.

I'm not talking about the same song stored more than once. I'm also not talking about a similarly-titled song, either (for example, both The Police and Pink Floyd have songs titled "Mother"). I don't mean that.

Here's what I mean:

When I first rip an album, it goes into a playlist that represents the album. For instance: Playlists/Rush/Moving Pictures. That playlist contains all of the songs from Moving Pictures in the proper order.

Now, I also have a playlist called "Tony's Favorites". There are three songs from that album which are my all-time favorite songs. So I copy Tom Sawyer, YYZ, and Limelight from the "Moving Pictures" playlist over to the "Tony's Favorites" playlist.

I still only have one copy of YYZ on the hard disk (the empeg is smart and won't double the usage of hard disk space when you do this). But now that copy is referenced in two different playlists: "Tony's Favorites" and "Moving Pictures".

Now I also have a playlist called "Test Audio", which contains tracks that have different sonic characteristics which I would want to test. One of the things I like to test is the panning on the crotales at the beginning of YYZ. So I copy that into the "Test Audio" playlist. Again, there's still only one copy of YYZ on the hard disk, it's just referenced in three places now.

All right. Now I stick the Empeg in the car and I shuffle-play the whole unit by pressing the bottom button three times. It shuffles all 1500 songs on the hard disk.

One thing that they added recently was a shuffle de-dupe function. So instead of YYZ appearing three times in the shuffled playlist, it only appears once. I'm not talking about three different song files named "YYZ", (such as the mother/mother example I gave above), I mean that the single copy of YYZ I referenced in three places will only appear once in this shuffled list.

Then, as the player is playing, YYZ comes on. I decide that it'd be cool to listen to the rest of the Moving Pictures album when that song is over. So I turn off Shuffle-Play and expect it to just sail into the rest of Moving Pictures. But it doesn't.

Instead, it plays the rest of the "Test Audio" playlist. Not what I had in mind.

The reason this happens is because when it de-duped the shuffled list, out of the three possible references to YYZ that it could have used as the source for the shuffle, it chose the one from the "Test Audio" playlist rather than the "Moving Pictures" playlist.

My desire would be that the sorting/de-duping algorithm allows my artist/album playlists to take precedence when un-shuffling. I could control which ones take precedence simply by sorting their order first in Emplode. Right now, it doesn't do this. Mike has offered to send me a test build of the player software that implements a different sort function when he gets the chance. When he gets the time to send it to me, and have a chance to test it, I'll let everyone know and update this thread.

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Tony Fabris