Page 1 of 2 12 LastLast
Results 1 to 10 of 14

Thread: Smart playlist pulls from the same albums over and over

  1. #1

    Default Smart playlist pulls from the same albums over and over

    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
    Last edited by willduan; 04-05-2021 at 03:56 AM.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Sep 2009
    Posts
    2,680

    Default

    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.

    Mezzmo Android: Install it on your tablet, smartphone, Android TV or Amazon Fire to browse and stream files from your Mezzmo library to all your devices. Full details at http://www.conceiva.com/products/mez...mo_android.asp
    Mezzmo for Kodi Add-on: Install it into Kodi to stream files from your Mezzmo library directly in Kodi. Full details at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki/doku.php?...odi_user_guide
    Mezzmo for Roku App: Install it onto your Roku to stream files from your Mezzmo library. Full details at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki/doku.php?...oku_user_guide
    Wiki: User Guides & Reference Manual at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki
    Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Mezzmo.DLNA.Server
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/conceiva_mezzmo
    Web: http://www.mezzmo.com

  3. #3

    Default

    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."

    Quote Originally Posted by Peter View Post
    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.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Sep 2009
    Posts
    2,680

    Default

    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.

    Mezzmo Android: Install it on your tablet, smartphone, Android TV or Amazon Fire to browse and stream files from your Mezzmo library to all your devices. Full details at http://www.conceiva.com/products/mez...mo_android.asp
    Mezzmo for Kodi Add-on: Install it into Kodi to stream files from your Mezzmo library directly in Kodi. Full details at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki/doku.php?...odi_user_guide
    Mezzmo for Roku App: Install it onto your Roku to stream files from your Mezzmo library. Full details at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki/doku.php?...oku_user_guide
    Wiki: User Guides & Reference Manual at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki
    Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Mezzmo.DLNA.Server
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/conceiva_mezzmo
    Web: http://www.mezzmo.com

  5. #5

    Default

    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

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Sep 2009
    Posts
    2,680

    Default

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

    Mezzmo Android: Install it on your tablet, smartphone, Android TV or Amazon Fire to browse and stream files from your Mezzmo library to all your devices. Full details at http://www.conceiva.com/products/mez...mo_android.asp
    Mezzmo for Kodi Add-on: Install it into Kodi to stream files from your Mezzmo library directly in Kodi. Full details at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki/doku.php?...odi_user_guide
    Mezzmo for Roku App: Install it onto your Roku to stream files from your Mezzmo library. Full details at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki/doku.php?...oku_user_guide
    Wiki: User Guides & Reference Manual at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki
    Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Mezzmo.DLNA.Server
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/conceiva_mezzmo
    Web: http://www.mezzmo.com

  7. #7

    Default

    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Peter View Post
    Your settings screenshot shows the playlist is sorted by Album / Series, can you please try changing this to Random shuffle?

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Sep 2009
    Posts
    2,680

    Default

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

    Mezzmo Android: Install it on your tablet, smartphone, Android TV or Amazon Fire to browse and stream files from your Mezzmo library to all your devices. Full details at http://www.conceiva.com/products/mez...mo_android.asp
    Mezzmo for Kodi Add-on: Install it into Kodi to stream files from your Mezzmo library directly in Kodi. Full details at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki/doku.php?...odi_user_guide
    Mezzmo for Roku App: Install it onto your Roku to stream files from your Mezzmo library. Full details at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki/doku.php?...oku_user_guide
    Wiki: User Guides & Reference Manual at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki
    Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Mezzmo.DLNA.Server
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/conceiva_mezzmo
    Web: http://www.mezzmo.com

  9. #9

    Default

    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!

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Sep 2009
    Posts
    2,680

    Default

    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.

    Mezzmo Android: Install it on your tablet, smartphone, Android TV or Amazon Fire to browse and stream files from your Mezzmo library to all your devices. Full details at http://www.conceiva.com/products/mez...mo_android.asp
    Mezzmo for Kodi Add-on: Install it into Kodi to stream files from your Mezzmo library directly in Kodi. Full details at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki/doku.php?...odi_user_guide
    Mezzmo for Roku App: Install it onto your Roku to stream files from your Mezzmo library. Full details at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki/doku.php?...oku_user_guide
    Wiki: User Guides & Reference Manual at http://www.mezzmo.com/wiki
    Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Mezzmo.DLNA.Server
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/conceiva_mezzmo
    Web: http://www.mezzmo.com

Similar Threads

  1. Smart Playlist Help
    By blackhawkfan42 in forum Mezzmo Questions and Support
    Replies: 6
    Last Post: 10-05-2016, 08:04 AM
  2. Smart(er) Playlist
    By jayheyl in forum Mezzmo Questions and Support
    Replies: 2
    Last Post: 10-20-2015, 05:03 PM
  3. Artwork for Smart Playlist(s)
    By smitbret in forum Mezzmo Wish List and Feedback
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: 06-22-2013, 07:00 AM
  4. Smart Playlist
    By mszalay in forum Mezzmo Questions and Support
    Replies: 6
    Last Post: 06-02-2011, 03:36 AM

Tags for this Thread

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •