Smart playlist pulls from the same albums over and over

[willduan]

Hi, I have smart playlists set up to group genres together for the purpose of shuffle play. The issue is that multiple songs from the same album appear and when you refresh the list, the same albums show up again. It adds all songs from an album to each playlist and also chooses the same albums repeatedly, which negates my intention of sampling across my library. This pattern happens across multiple genre based lists. Any ideas on how to get it to pull from a wider set of songs? I've tried limiting number of songs, setting the number to 300, playing with sort order to no avail.

Example smart playlist attributes:
Name: Old School
Match: Any
Genre contains Rockabilly
Genre contains Roots Rock
Genre contains Rockabilly

[Peter]

Hi,
it depends upon how large a pool of tracks the shuffle play is pulling from as to whether albums are repeated. The random selection is made from all the albums each time so the fewer albums that are available to select from the more likely tracks will be selected from the same album. Try removing the limit completely to see how many tracks are in the Genre selections.

[willduan]

Hi! The pool is 897 albums and 13,500 files
Removing the limit increased the number of albums beyond the ones it pulls every time with the item limit, but still pulls all songs from an album and chooses the albums it does. One other setting I didn't mention is the content rating is at the default "not rated."

Hi,
it depends upon how large a pool of tracks the shuffle play is pulling from as to whether albums are repeated. The random selection is made from all the albums each time so the fewer albums that are available to select from the more likely tracks will be selected from the same album. Try removing the limit completely to see how many tracks are in the Genre selections.

[Peter]

Is it a smart playlist or an active playlist? Active playlists will add the album as a sub-playlist if the keyword album is added to the list of keywords. A smart playlist will just be a flat playlist and will not group files by album. The party shuffle playlist included with the default playlists when you install Mezzmo is an example of this.

[willduan]

It is a smart playlist.
Here's a video that shows refreshing the list and adding a trailing space to make sure it forces reloading showing the behavior. For the video I did sort by album to show how it's pulling all songs from each album.
https://youtu.be/t9BD3MfaiB0
Settings screencap

[Peter]

Your settings screenshot shows the playlist is sorted by Album / Series, can you please try changing this to Random shuffle?

[willduan]

This produces similar results with the same albums and pulling all songs from albums, except the songs from each alums are distributed in the playlist.

Your settings screenshot shows the playlist is sorted by Album / Series, can you please try changing this to Random shuffle?

[Peter]

Isn't the goal of shuffle play to have them distributed in the playlist so this would achieve what you are after.

[willduan]

The places where it's not behaving as expected (IMHO) is 1. drawing from a very limited subset of albums within the genres listed, even when the list is regenerated and 2. Including all songs from a given album. It seems notable to be that there are no rules about albums in the smartlist (just genre) but it seems to be operating using albums. Perhaps of interest, I did some playing around with sorting and the albums that show up over and over are all at the top of each genre when sorted alphabetically by album.
My expected output from this smartlist would be a list of songs selected from all entries that meet the genre criteria and have the recurrence of an album (or artist) be roughly similar to the prevalence in the parts of the library specified. In this case we're looking at hundreds of albums and 9,907 songs so I would expect repeats to not happen too much.

Thanks for all the responses!

[Peter]

We are using the stdlib function rand() so the randomness of the distribution may be limited by this and producing indexes that are close to the previous indexes resulting in songs from the same album being selected. Possibly an idea might be to apply an additional sql function to distribute the values so that tracks from the same album are not close together. Not sure how to do this yet.