Custom Shuffle - Newest First

First, thanks to the empeg team for fixing CTIME. That's one of the coolest things in the new release.

With the fix, it looks like my custom shuffle mode, Newest First, is working flawlessly. If anybody is interested, I put the following line under the "[custom]" section of the config.ini.

shuffle0=Newest First,-CTIME=32000

I suppose you could do oldest first by taking off the "-" sign. Anybody else have cool custom shuffle modes?

I've tried that and about 10 other different combinations as posted in the technical forum, and I'm still SOL after upgrading to b13. I wonder if JEmplode fills in that field properly? Did you use Emplode or JEmplode? It doesn't matter how I shuffle by CTIME, it's almost always in the same order.

I've been using Emplode. Go into Emplode (or Jemplode) and view all tracks. Add the column "Created" to the view, then sort on that column. All the tracks should have a time stamp and sort properly (oldest or newest first). If they don't, then there's a problem.

Like I said, it hadn't been working until I upgraded to beta13.

Ooo...I've been wishing for a shuffle feature like this!

Go into Emplode (or Jemplode) and view all tracks. Add the column "Created" to the view

JEmplode for me -- I'm on Linux. The Created column is 100% empty. Not a single one of my songs has it.

Aha.

See if you can synch once with a 2.0x version of Emplode, it will prompt you to update the databse to the 2.0 version, which will include that missing field.

Interesting incompatibility there. Originally loaded using 1.0 player firmware. 2.0 player firmware installed, but 2.0 emplode never connected. Files on player still using the 1.0 file format.

Don't suppose there's any way for Mike to easily detect and trigger that big 2.0 database re-do thingy in Jemplode is there?

Don't suppose there's any way for Mike to easily detect and trigger that big 2.0 database re-do thingy in Jemplode is there?

I sure hope there is... I have no access to Emplode, aka a Windows program.

Edit: I'm trying emptool now...
Edit2: Nope, no dice. I tried using it to just sync, and tried the repair command, and tried the --rebuild flag. No Create fields were magically filled in. Then tried uploading a new song with JEmplode. New songs didn't have the Create field, either...

The ctime field is optional. emplode v1.0 didn't create it. emptool doesn't create it. I guess that because emptool doesn't create it, Jemplode doesn't create it.

And since it's optional, there's no code in emplode/emptool to fix it up after the fact.

Bummer. Guess I'll have to make another JEmplode request. Maybe I should learn Java...

Actually I do, but ctime wasn't included on the list of tags to fix. Didn't know that it existed, actually I'll include this in the next release...

Is ctime the time the MP3 was added to the Empeg in epoc-time?

Ok, did I completely miss this, or did you guys add a "Newest Additions" shuffle mode in the actual beta13 release?

Yes.

That's good, since mine doesn't seem to want to work all the time.

Can one of the empeg guys tell me what they used for the newest additions shuffle? I'd like to make one that also takes some randomness into account.

Er, yeah. I think so. It's a standard Unix time_t, straight from

time_t now = time(NULL)