I was messing with the Tweak Order functions today and I think there's something fishy going on. I've noticed this before (for many versions, ever since tweak order was introduced), but couldn't really put my finger on anything concrete enough for an official report until now.

This isn't a big deal. For example, it shouldn't hold up the public release of 1.01 or anything, which is why I'm posting it here instead of telling empeg about it directly.

Okay. Here's the setup: I'm playing my "low key" playlist, shuffled. Somewhere at the beginning of the playlist, it played the song "Travels" by Pat Metheny, from his most recent "Trio 99-00" album.

Later (about 30 songs into the playlist according to the little number on the now/next screen), another song from the "Trio 99-00" album appears, in this case, the song was called "We Had a Sister". At that moment, I decided I wanted to hear "Travels" again.

But I didn't want to restart the playlist or anything. I didn't even want the current song to stop, I just wanted the next song in the shuffle to be "Travels". And since we don't have an "Insert by title" function yet, I thought I'd use Tweak Order to get what I was after.

So I pressed "3" on the remote, to have it find "Matching Source", which it did dutifully, and found another song from "Trio 99-00" (I think I have three or four songs from that album in that playlist).

It wasn't the song I wanted, though, it wasn't "Travels". So I pressed 8 to make it randomly swap the next song. Then I pressed 3 again. The idea in my head is that, after a couple of 8/3 presses, my desired song would drop into the next slot. I mean, if I've only got three or four songs from that album in this playlist, it shouldn't take that many re-swaps to make it appear.

But it never appeared. Every time, I got the same undesired song from that album.

So I thought, Hmm. Instead of pressing "8" first, I just pressed "3" a second time to force it to pick something other than the undesired song. It said it couldn't find any matching source. But I know that playlist had at least one other song from that album, because I'd just heard it a few songs ago.

Here's my theory: When you do "Tweak Order", it only picks from the remainder of the current playlist, not from the entire playlist. Since I'd already passed "Travels" in the playlist, it never went hunting for it.

Okay, so to summarize: Problem 1: Tweak Order only picks from what's left of the current playlist.

Onto my other problem:

The "8/3" stunt I described above is generally my way of working around the lack of an "Insert by title" feature for now. There have been times when I've used it successfully while playing a huge shuffled playlist (the root playlist of the whole player).

However, when I use that 8/3 stunt, it takes way more tries to get the desired song than it should, and it has a tendency to pick the same song over and over again. For instance, if it's currently playing "YYZ" and I want the next song to be "Limelight", I should expect to hit 8/3 about 6 to 12 times before it comes up properly. But instead of all of the Moving Pictures tracks coming up randomly in that next slot, it tends to keep dropping the same song into the next slot (for example, "Witch Hunt"). It could take me 30 tries to get it to drop "Limelight" into the slot, 25 of which came up with the same result every time.

So, in summary. Problem 2: Tweak Order doesn't randomize hard enough when you ask it to find you another song.

This might be related to something I've noticed, separate from the Tweak Order functions, which is that I don't think the unit is randomizing very hard to begin with. For instance, when I shuffle the whole unit, I get a lot more "two-fers" and "three-fers" than I'd expect by chance. It's taken me months of listening to come to this conclusion, so it's very subtle. But what are the odds that this is the case? How's the code work for randomizing the actual de-duped playlists?

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Tony Fabris