Perhaps someone from the development team can give us a clue here? I'll document it in the FAQ if you do.

Boy, am I good, or what?!

(from an e-mail exchange dated april 6, 2001)


From: "Peter Hartley"

Douglas Burnside wrote:
> And on a peripherally related topic... how about adding one more
> shuffle mode, "Most Often Played". This would be an easy way to
> dynamically generate a "favorites" playlist on the fly.

The 1.1 player software allows for user-defined shuffles. The UI for
creating them probably won't get added to Emplode in time for 1.1final, but
if you don't mind grubbing about on the player, you can add a section to the
config.ini file as follows:

[custom]
shuffle0=Favourites,-PLAYS=32000,RANDOM=1

Make sure you spell "Favourites" in UK English ;-)

This sets up a shuffle where the number of plays largely defines the order
(the minus sign means large numbers come first), but there's also a random
element so that if there are five tracks you've all heard, say, 20 times
each, those five get shuffled each time.

You can use any number of tags (Emplode column headings) in the shuffle --
as long as each one has numeric values, of course. You can also use the tags
"PLAYS", and (on Mk2) "TIME", which is a measure from 0-32000 of how long
it's been since you last heard it. The built-in shuffles are defined as:

Random,RANDOM=1
Least often played,PLAYS=1,RANDOM=2
Least recently played,TIME=32000,RANDOM=2000
By year,-YEAR=32768,RANDOM=1



Is this what you were looking for, Tony?

tanstaafl.