First off, let me say that Hijack is awesome! My only two "wish list" items are:

1. Get the LED hack to stop flashing when pressing buttons. This might not be possible it sounds like from another post.

2. Add a feature to the Shuffle menu that when selected, will randomly select one artist and play all songs by that artist in a shuffled play list. Sometimes I just get tired of looking for an album and it would be sweet if the player just grabbed one and started playing.

Does anyone else think these are worth looking into?

I don't think either of those things can be done in Hijack. The first one because of a hardware limitation, the second one because Hijack can't exert that kind of control over the player software.

So could the shuffle option be implemented in the empeg software? I'll post this in the wish list if so.

The shuffle mode you descibe can be done already, as-is, using playlist properties.

go into the search menu and search artist, and you can play everything by that artist, then hit the suffle button and your set

He wanted to pick a random artist...

In reply to:

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The shuffle mode you descibe can be done already, as-is, using playlist properties.

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Please don't tell me this is in the FAQ...
(after looking out for the deadly FAQ hammer) can you possibly fill me in on how to do this?

No, it's not in the FAQ although I should probably make an entry on the subject.

Just look at the properties box of any playlist and you might be able to figure out how to do it. Remember that "always randomize contents" actually means "always randomize only the immediate children of this playlist". So, if you had a bunch of artist playlists under a "shuffled artists" playlist, and each of those had "always randomize contents", then you would get blocks of random artists, with the songs internal to those blocks randomized.

Hi.

Extending Tony's post a bit:
If you want a playlist to play exactly _one_ random artist, while playing all the songs of that artist in random order, you can do this:

1. Upload the songs to your player
2. Create a playlist "1 random artist random songs" (or short: 1RARS)
3. Create one sub-playlist for each artist below that 1RARS playlist. This could be done most easily in jemplode: Just go to the "artists" soup view, select all sub-playlist, copy, select 1RARS, paste.
4. edit the 1RARS playlist's flags: always randomize, pick 1 item.
5. edit the flags of all sub-playlists (using group editing) to "always randomize"
   

This should do it. Each time you select the 1RARS playlist, one item of that playlist (one artist) is selected at random, and all contents of that item are then randomized.

cu,
sven

You can also dig up the thread "Equally Weighted Artists" with a BBS search.

Thanks a ton guys, or is it tonne? Thanks for taking the time to set a newbie straight.

Yeah, not much I can do about the flickering buttons.. it's just the way it works in the hardware/firmware. Maybe the "capacitor hack" (hardware) would help with this.. dunno.

As for the playlist stuff, that can be done (as others have noted) with the stock player software.

Cheers