Is it possible when searching for a tune, to play that tune, then play the rest of the album where the track came from, starting from the next track in order.

Either that, or use search to jump to a track in the full playlist.

Also, to display the track number of a tune, relative to it's original position on the CD, not it's position in the playlist.

(I seem to be stuck with the Album/Track mentality mainly because most of my albums are mixed, and so shuffle sounds horrible... maybe it'll wear off after a while )

Apologies if the answer to this is here somewhere, but I've been looking for the answer to this for about the last 5 hours, and have read the FAQ and searched the board.

Once a tune is playing on the player, the player has no "sense" of which playlist that tune came from. So, no, not exactly, you can't do that.

For example, let's say you searched on my player for the song "The Cape" by Trevor Rabin. That song exists in three places on my player:

- In "Trevor Rabin/Can't Look Away".
- In "(Low Key)".
- In "(Demo)".

So even if I could tell the player to go play the rest of that song's playlist, it wouldn't know which of those three playlists to play.

Now, there are other things you can do which are similar to what you want to do:

- If you are shuffling the whole player, and you hit a given song, you can use the Tweak Order feature to find more random songs from that album. This will even work with the result of a search, provided that your search was an insert rather than a replace (details of inserts are here in case you didn't already know.

- If you are shuffling the whole player, and you hit a given song, you can simply un-shuffle, and it will drop you back into the middle of the album. There is one caveat about doing this here, but it works for me.

- You can always do a search-by-album and insert it.

- You can always select an album's playlist and insert it from the playlists menu (details here).

Perhaps, when the Soup views get implemented on the player, something like what you want will be available through those features. But you said yourself: You're thinking in the CD/TRACK mentality still. Eventually, you'll get used to the player's flexibility and won't need the feature you're requesting. For me, I am perfectly happy just being able to un-shuffle around the current song. And I don't even do that very often.

Eventually, you'll get used to the player's flexibility and won't need the feature you're requesting.

I think it's awfully presumptuous to tell him (and me) that we don't need that feature. I've owned my empeg for a year and a half or so, and I still want that feature. It's not that I'm thinking about CDs. It's that I'm thinking about albums. Usually, when I put the empeg in shuffle mode, it's not really because I want to listen to that great a variety of things, but that I can't think what album I want to listen to, or because I'm in a rut and need it to suggest something new for me.

Honestly, I'm not that happy with the ``unshuffle around'' solution to this problem, but I'm not going to complain about it. It's not really what the empeg was designed to do, IMHO. But given that you always extol the empeg's great database features, it seems like this could be one of them. Just being able to search is not the ultimate of databasing. I understand the issue of ``which playlist'', but there are a lot of solutions to that problem, from marking one playlist as the home playlist to interactively asking the user which one he wants to go to.

I, too, think the un-shuffle solution is far from ideal. As for how to get around the "which playlist" issue, how about just having the player take the current track and use the "Source" and "Track" fields rather than trying to pick a playlist... So it would pull out all the songs from the same source, sort them on track, and there you've got your album. It would probably want to also use the Artist field in case two artists have albums of the same name ("Greatest Hits" being the obvious candidate for worst offender.)

This solution require accurate Source and Track fields, but has the advantage of being very straightforward. It could also be chosen to replace the existing Tweak Order source button, since it would have the same effect, save sorting the tracks, and it would tweak ALL of the tracks from the album instead of just one each time you hit the button.

I'm not saying it's easy to implement, though.

Maybe it would be possible to implement a feature whereby if you select unshuffle while there is only one file in your playlist (ie. if you had selected that tune by searching), that it would drop you back to the place in the master playlist where the tune came from.

I realise that this would require accurate source and track names, but I'm sure that anyone who would want this feature would have near perfect tags anyway.

There is the issue of having multiple entries of that track, so the player wouldn't know which playlist to drop back to, but that would be taken care by the player matching the source with the name of a playlist. I'm not sure how accurate this would be if the name of the playlist isn't an exact match to the source field.

BTW, does anyone know how to feed an external PCM source into the empeg's board?

Oli.

In reply to:

---

Once a tune is playing on the player, the player has no "sense" of which playlist that tune came from. So, no, not exactly, you can't do that.

---

Surely the player must know where the song came from to be able to de-shuffle around it.


Oli.

Not really, it finds first occurence of the fid - I think there's a FAQ entry about unshuffling and what order to have your playlist in for it to work properly.

/Michael

So to play the rest of the album, the player doesn't need to know where it came from,

It could just play from that FID onwards. - the giving the same net result.

Oli.

Here's the link the FAQ entry

Essentially, the player looks through the playlists in play order and picks up at the first hit - but if you were playing say a 80's playlist and also have the more or less standard Artist - Album -Tune tree also, whether it will unshuffle and play the 80s list or the Album the song comes from depends on which playlist has the lowest play order number...

/Michael

So to play the rest of the album, the player doesn't need to know where it came from, It could just play from that FID onwards. - the giving the same net result.

Right. That's what it does when you un-shuffle. It un-shuffles around your current position, and the rest of that album plays.

Although it doesn't work exactly as you describe it. It doesn't go by FID, it goes by playlist order (becuase FIDs can be in a different order than the playlists).

Here's the way the player currently does its shuffling...

- When you select a playlist, it recursively (down the tree) grabs all songs from that playlist and all of its sub-playlists.

- The result is a flattened list of songs.

- It stores that flattened list of un-shuffled songs onto the scratch partition.

- It shuffles and de-dupes that list, and stores it onto the scratch partition, also.

Whenever you re-initiate a shuffle, it takes that un-shuffled list and re-shuffles it, locates the first occurence of your current song and moves you to that point in the list (allowing you to shuffle without interrupting playback).

Whenever you disengage a shuffle, it loads the un-shuffled list, locates the first occurence of your current song, and moves you to that point in the list (allowing you to be dropped into the correct point in the un-shuffled list without interrupting playback).

The player has no knowledge of whether the list of songs surrounding your current song is an accurate "album" or not. The only way the player could know how to re-assemble an album is by inference from the tags. And then it would only be a guess. And in my case, it wouldn't work every time because sometimes I retag compilation albums so that the correct original album is listed. For example, it wouldn't work for my copy of the Sopranos soundtrack because I've retagged all the songs to say the correct original album.

I realise how the de-shuffle option works (i have read the FAQ cover to cover (metaphorically), but the point I am trying to extract is...

why can't the same algorithm be applied to make it play the rest of the album/playlist after searching for a tune.

Why not add another mode to replace/insert/append called 'disc' (or something) that dumps you in the location in the master playlist where the tune came from (or the first occurance of that tune).

Surely when most people search for a tune, they don't just want to listen to that tune and then have to re-search for some more tunes in 5min.

Would anyone else find this useful?

Oli.

Would anyone else find this useful?

I don't see how anything could be more useful than one button.

If I am playing the whole player, shuffled, and a song comes on from an album I like, I press one button (the 0 key on the Rio remote), and it un-shuffles. I am now in the middle of that album.

Why not add another mode to replace/insert/append called 'disc' (or something)

There's a "search-by-source" that you can insert. "Source" in this case means album. If you want to search for an album, it works great for me.

If you happen to have your albums arranged in playlists, you can also search by playlist.

OK... Well, sure, I don't think there's any technical stuff that makes it impossible to implement that (picking the first playlist with the fid) . But couldn't you achieve much the same by searching for the album (Source)?

/Michael

Surely when most people search for a tune, they don't just want to listen to that tune and then have to re-search for some more tunes in 5min.

Oh! Wait! I think I know what's going on here.

Okay, perhaps it's just a question of how you're using the player. You usually have the player playing "nothing" and then occasionally search for a tune or something. Or pick a short playlist.

Most everyone else does it the opposite. Have the player playing its entire contents (press Down Down Down on the front panel) and it will always be playing something, it never stops.

Then, when you want to hear something SPECIFIC, then you do a search with INSERT activated, and it comes up next. That's what most people do. At least I think so.

I think that I maybe didn't explain properly in the first place...

I think that shuffling the whole player is a fantastic way to discover music that you didn't even know you had, and I do spend a lot of time listening to it that way.

Unfortunately, because about half of the stuff I have is on mixed compilations, it's nice to be able to think 'I haven't heard ???? for a while', search for it, then play the rest of the long-forgotten album. -without having to play that tune, read the source, then do another search on that source.

Bearing in mind that I don't know what album it's on to be able to do an insert by source in the first place.

(...and i'm sure i'm not the only one who thinks that shuffling a mixed album sounds unbearable. )

Oli.

So what you're saying is that you only remember song titles, not album titles, and you can't search on a given album because you don't know its title? You can only search on songs because those are the only things you remember?

it the song is playing you can hold down the info button and get the details about it then play that album/source

My brain is not quite that bad (yet)

For instance: I have 17 gatecrasher CDs loaded. If I want to listen to the one with 'PVD - for an angel' on it. I have to search by title - because I don't know which one it's on.

It would then be nice to be able to listen to the rest of the album, because the music will be similar to the track I've searched for. It also respect's the set-progression of the mixed album.

Oli.

ps. could you possibly see your way to lending your expertise to my bluetooth problem. no-one else seems particularly interested.

Sorry, I know nothing at all about bluetooth, I'm afraid.

Hi Tony,

I thought that "Tweak order/source" (where source is "album name" as ID3 tag I guess) would solve this problem but it seems to just "fix" the next track. Has this behaviour changed somewhat since the 1.0x versions of the player ? I've probably only used it 1 - 3 times but I recall that it replaced the current playlist with ALL matching items (artist/source whatever). It could be that I'm developing serious memory failures though, what was the question again

I know this was to Tony, but...

The tweak order searches the current playlist for the same artist as is currently playing, and moves it to the next position in the playlist.
Consecutive presses cue up more tracks by that artist.
It only searches the current playlist for the artist though, it doesn't search the whole player.


Oli.

In fact it swaps the next track with one matching your tweak selection. I wish it did an insert of the new track.

I also wish the feature worked outside of playlists. Unless you're playing your entire player, the tweak feature isn't so useful.

I agree with your original request. And it seems like I'm the only one that fully understands you. It would be cool to be able to do a mass-tweak on "source" even when the matching tracks aren't currently in your dynamic (playing) list.

Hopefully something like this will come about with soup views on the player (if they rev anything other than track selection).

Bruno

agree with your original request. And it seems like I'm the only one that fully understands you.

For the record, I strongly agreed with this request too. Some have written this kind of request off as being "un-Empeg like." I say that any feature which makes it easier for me to hear the music I want to hear at a given time is a Really Good Thing. The "un-shuffle around" solution is *not* ideal.

This feature is not easy to implement given the fact that the player doesn't have the concept of "albums." All it's got is playlists and FID metadata. As Tony mentioned, matching an artist and source field together to create another index doesn't necessarily do the job for compilations. Furthermore, using just the source field doesn't work because of albums with names like "Play" (Moby, Squeeze, Doug. E. Fresh, Reset) or the ever-popular "Greatest Hits."

So for a solution that works for everyone, Emplode and the player would have to have a UI and a database which allows the user to designate certain playlists as albums. Then each song which is part of an album would have to have a pointer to some kind of album structure in the database. This would require some extra work but I can't see how else the player could figure out what an album is given the flexible nature of the database.

We're in general now, and I haven't seen this feature asked for in Wish List, so I'm going to go cross-post.