Anyone else think it would be handy if there was a "number of skips" and/or "number of complete listens" stat in the database?

Shuffle by one these stats would be handy, and being able to "factor it" into other shuffle methods would be ultra cool.

"Shuffle by least frequently played AND least frequently skipped" is what most of us are actually wanting when we select "shuffle by least often played", but I think you have to listen to the complete song for it to register as played, because everytime I hit that I keep getting the few songs I want on but dont really want to listen to.

And yes, I have thought about sticking them in another playlist or deleting them.

I just htought this would be cool.

Huh?

Both of these are in the current software (2.0b11.) Called "plays" and "skipped" in Emplode, I think. You can add them as List View columns, and I think maybe see them in the track properties page (not sure about that though.)

The "skipped" is not implemented in the player software, though, and the "plays" tends to be a bit flaky. But what you've asked for is "kinda there," it just needs some fine tuning.

Oh yeah.


Right.


I knew that.....


I really *meant* to say "it would be nice to see themn made more use of in the software, maybe even with an autoskip frequently skipped tracks option".




How did I miss that? Good to see its kinda there though. I will attribute that to oversight on my part, rather than massively impressive response time of the development team.....

"Skips" is not currently tracked by the software. The field is there in the database, but nothing is done with that field yet. It will always read "0".

Yeah, the dev team knows these are wanted, but I am not sure where they have it planned to make those two fields fully functional. Were the contents of the fields functional, I'm sure they could be integrated with the custom shuffle modes to provide an "autoskip (or at least lower the probability of playing) frequently skipped tracks" shuffle mode. Based on what I've read, and the other commitments of the dev team to other products, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for it in 2.0 final, might be a 2.X thing for the future. Maybe Tony Fabris can tell us if there's been any modification to plays/skipped in the most recent 2.0 alphas.

There have also been a lot of other suggestions around these fields, such as when the "plays" and "skipped" counters should be incremented. Right now "plays" goes up at the 5 second mark, and "skipped" is dormant. The best suggestion I heard was to increment "plays" after 2/3 of the song is played, and increment "skipped" if the song is skipped before 1/3 of the song is played. 5 seconds sometimes isn't enough time to figure out if you want to hear the rest, and I liked the idea of the decision being made at a time relative to the length of the song, rather than some arbitrary fixed time within the song.

We can talk about this stuff all we want, though, it's up to the fellas to make it happen.

The alpha I've got still doesn't implement Skips.

And it still has the bug where, if you have a song that's shorter than 5 seconds long, its "plays" count and "time played" never gets increased.

ya.. but would u really care if that song had a play or not, i mean its not even a song its a bleep, or a test tone.

I have two songs on my player of that length, and they are, in fact, complete songs.

The fact that the player does not count them as "played" means that they always come up first when I do a custom shuffle of least-recently-played, or least-often-played.

I have quite a few sound bytes from movies sprinkled in my playlists that most would qualify for <5 seconds long.

toyn what songs are only 5 seconds long?

I have several that are only five seconds long, but two that are LESS THAN five seconds long. They are all tracks from the album "Apollo 18" by They Might Be Giants. Please see here for more information.

I also have a single track that is just less than 5 seconds. It is in fact a silent track, I used it to insert between items in a playlist when I was using my Mk1 empeg to provide the music for our wedding ceremony. The 5 second silences were needed to give my brother (who was handling the cueing of the music) a fighting chance at stopping at the end of each track without running into the next track.