Now that 12c properly de-dupes the song list before shuffling, I'm wondering something.

Okay, I've discussed in other places that when I turn off the shuffle, I'm usually hoping for it to behave like a CD player and play the next song on the album. But as we all know, the Empeg is a lot more complicated than a CD player...

So let's say I'm shuffling my whole unit from the root. Tom Sawyer comes on, and I decide that I'd like to hear the rest of the Moving Pictures album when it's done, so I turn off shuffle. But the Tom Sawyer it was playing wasn't the one from my Rush/Moving Pictures playlist, was the one from my Test Audio Tracks playlist. So when I un-shuffle, it plays the next song from the Test Audio Tracks playlist instead of Red Barchetta. (And Doug, no comments from the peanut gallery about how the whole album should have been in that playlist anyway, it's just an example.)

I'm guessing that the reason it was the "wrong" Tom Sawyer was because somehow the "Test Audio Tracks" playlist appeared first in the playlist tree, and when the unit de-duped the flattened playlist for the shuffle, it picked that as the one to keep. When it un-shuffled, its index into the flattened un-shuffled playlist corresponded to the Test Audio playlist instead of the Rush/Moving Pictures playlist.

So is there any way I can make sure that version of Tom Sawyer appears LAST in the playlist tree? Can I make sure the artist/album playlists appear first?

Note: I've already tried dragging my custom playlists to the bottom of the list in Emplode and re-synching. The same issue occurs. The issue is intermittent, there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which one it picks in the shuffle. Sometimes an un-shuffle drops me to the album playlist, sometimes it drops me to one of my custom playlists.

Also Note: I don't have Tom Sawyer stored twice on the Empeg. I have it only stored once, and its presence in the other playlists are simply links to the original song file copied from other playlists.

How does the Empeg determine the order of tracks when de-duping, and is there anything at all I can do about it from an end-user perspective?

___________
Tony Fabris

the reason it was the "wrong" Tom Sawyer was because somehow the "Test Audio Tracks" playlist appeared first in the playlist tree

How about approaching it from the other end?

If the player could differentiate between 'original' and 'copy' tracks, this wouldn't be too difficult, would it? Shuffle mode could skip dupes, and whenever you 'unshuffled' a list, Emma/Mark would always continue with the playlist from which the original came. Playlist maintenance would become more difficult though / what to do when you delete the 'original'?

or

Breaking branches off the play tree, by using a playlist indicator that will exclude it (and the ones below) from being played from lists higher up in the hierarchy, while they (and decendants) can still be played when directly selected. This would skip any test and demo lists when shuffling the whole unit from the root, and still allow 'demo' lists with multiple playlists (artists / albums).

My 2p
Any other ideas?


Henno
mk2 nr 6

I didn't see this as a problem Tony as you only have Rush on your empeg anyway!

Murray 06000047
____________________

Theoretically if your root playlist is not marked for randomisation then the playlist order of the items dictates which is actually used.

However, the player uses the STL std::sort call as part of the deduping process. Maybe I should change it to use std::stable_sort to guarantee the relative position of equivalent elements. This would mean that it was always the first that was selected.

--
Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)

Those are both interesting ideas, Henno, and would both work to solve my problem.

My original message, though, was to ask if there was a way I could handle it from a purely end-user perspective without asking for any software changes at all.

I've actually thought of something that might help:

I thought that if I deleted all of the "custom" playlists, leaving only my artist/album sets, then re-synched, then re-created the "custom" playlists from scratch, it might force them to the end of the database and allow it to work the way I want to.

I haven't tried this yet...

___________
Tony Fabris

Theoretically if your root playlist is not marked for randomisation then the playlist order of the items dictates which is actually used.

Fantastic, Mike! Thanks for that crucial bit of data!

I will try that out right away!

___________
Tony Fabris

However, the player uses the STL std::sort call as part of the deduping process. Maybe I should change it to use std::stable_sort to guarantee the relative position of equivalent elements. This would mean that it was always the first that was selected.

I think that might be worth a try. After removing the "always randomize" tag from every playlist, making sure my albums were listed first and my custom playlists were last, then re-syncing, I still get the same behavior: When I un-shuffle I'm sometimes dropped into one of the custom playlists instead of an album playlist.

Would you mind building one that way and sending it to me to test?

I assume that it would make things slower when you hit the "shuffle" button, though, huh?

___________
Tony Fabris

Out of curiosity, why do people have copies of the same song? When I got done ripping my CD's, the first thing I did was get rid of the duplicates. Anything that's live is labeled as such, so they're different, anyhow. Or does the empeg not care whether the tag has "(live)" attached to the end of the title? I'm not exactly clear on how it looks at the tags and differentiates, if at all. I think the playlist ordering and such is just about the most complex piece of the empeg.



George

Out of curiosity, why do people have copies of the same song?

We don't. Maybe I should be a bit more clear.

I'm not talking about the same song stored more than once. I'm also not talking about a similarly-titled song, either (for example, both The Police and Pink Floyd have songs titled "Mother"). I don't mean that.

Here's what I mean:

When I first rip an album, it goes into a playlist that represents the album. For instance: Playlists/Rush/Moving Pictures. That playlist contains all of the songs from Moving Pictures in the proper order.

Now, I also have a playlist called "Tony's Favorites". There are three songs from that album which are my all-time favorite songs. So I copy Tom Sawyer, YYZ, and Limelight from the "Moving Pictures" playlist over to the "Tony's Favorites" playlist.

I still only have one copy of YYZ on the hard disk (the empeg is smart and won't double the usage of hard disk space when you do this). But now that copy is referenced in two different playlists: "Tony's Favorites" and "Moving Pictures".

Now I also have a playlist called "Test Audio", which contains tracks that have different sonic characteristics which I would want to test. One of the things I like to test is the panning on the crotales at the beginning of YYZ. So I copy that into the "Test Audio" playlist. Again, there's still only one copy of YYZ on the hard disk, it's just referenced in three places now.

All right. Now I stick the Empeg in the car and I shuffle-play the whole unit by pressing the bottom button three times. It shuffles all 1500 songs on the hard disk.

One thing that they added recently was a shuffle de-dupe function. So instead of YYZ appearing three times in the shuffled playlist, it only appears once. I'm not talking about three different song files named "YYZ", (such as the mother/mother example I gave above), I mean that the single copy of YYZ I referenced in three places will only appear once in this shuffled list.

Then, as the player is playing, YYZ comes on. I decide that it'd be cool to listen to the rest of the Moving Pictures album when that song is over. So I turn off Shuffle-Play and expect it to just sail into the rest of Moving Pictures. But it doesn't.

Instead, it plays the rest of the "Test Audio" playlist. Not what I had in mind.

The reason this happens is because when it de-duped the shuffled list, out of the three possible references to YYZ that it could have used as the source for the shuffle, it chose the one from the "Test Audio" playlist rather than the "Moving Pictures" playlist.

My desire would be that the sorting/de-duping algorithm allows my artist/album playlists to take precedence when un-shuffling. I could control which ones take precedence simply by sorting their order first in Emplode. Right now, it doesn't do this. Mike has offered to send me a test build of the player software that implements a different sort function when he gets the chance. When he gets the time to send it to me, and have a chance to test it, I'll let everyone know and update this thread.

___________
Tony Fabris

Boy, you sure were clear. Thanks for the excellent clarification. If I had thought about it for a minute, I probably would've realized that's what you meant, but I guess suffering withdrawal has my mind a bit lapse. I would've expected the same behaviour you did, though I understand why it acts how it does. Too bad it can't read our minds yet. That'll be in the Mark XXVI, won't it? But, I guess a decent trade-off is that it goes into the artist directory.

George

Is this one bound for the FAQ Sheet too?

Murray 06000047
____________________

Is this one bound for the FAQ Sheet too?

Mike has suggested that he intends to try a different sorting algorithm which might take care of the problem. Also, Hugo just hinted in another thread that the next release will have a different kind of shuffle algorithm (but gave no clue as to what it was about, darn him). So by the next release, this might not need to go into the FAQ at all.

Anyway, by definition, "FAQ" is frequently asked questions. And since I'm the only one who ever complained about it, that doesn't count as frequent.

___________
Tony Fabris