Ability to set up >=2 mutually exclusive playlists

[civiliza]

I have seen this request before as a guest, but can't seem to find the right topic to hang my request on. Sorry if I'm duplicating other people's work.

I use iTunes to synchronize my ipod, and MediaMonkey to synchronize my Samsung MP3 player(s).

As such, I am aware of a key feature in iTunes which does not seem to be implemented correctly in MediaMonkey. That is setting up mutually exclusive Random Autoplaylists.

With iTunes you can set up an Autoplaylist which contains say 10 random tunes that is not in another Autoplaylist of say 15 random tunes. The net result on synchronization is 25 random tunes that are guaranteed to be different from each other split over two playlists.

While MediaMonkey Gold does have the Autoplaylist criteria "Playlist is ..." and "Playlist is not ...", these only seem to work with static Playlists. If I attempt to set up a repeat of the iTunes example above, there is a chance that the same tune could appear on both playlists.


A simple example (to show what is wrong and to test any potential solution) is as follows:

Set up a source autoplaylist A with criteria:
"Album equals <album with 10 tracks>"
"Sort order Random"

Set up autoplaylist B with criteria:
"Playlist is <autoplaylist A>"
"Show at most 5 tracks"
"Sort order Random"

Set up autoplaylist C with criteria:
"Match All of the following criteria"
"Playlist is <autoplaylist A>"
"Playlist is not <autoplaylist B>"
"Show at most 5 tracks"
"Sort order Random"

Ideally all 10 tracks should be present split randomly between playlists B and C. In practice however there is a high probability that when synchronized one or more tracks will be duplicated.

(DON'T set up both "B is not C" and "C is not B" - last time I tried that I think it caused a crash)


Why is this important to me?

Over the years I have tried a variety of Samsung MP3 players and they have all had an upper limit beyond which a playlist will still synch, but tunes no longer appear in the playlist. Ie if I set up a playlist of say 500 tunes, all 500 tunes will synch, but depending on the model, the playlist will be truncated after an arbitrary number of tunes. As a result, tunes are present on the player that do not appear in the playlist.

How then can I create several small random playlists and still guarantee that all of the tracks in these playlists are unique?

[Lowlander]

The reason this wouldn't work is that each time playlist A and B are called a different set of random tracks are shown. In your situation you call the list twice as such the playlist C is likely to contain tracks on playlist B.

I think if you take random out of Playlist A and B it might work.

So the issue here is that MediaMonkey should only make one call to any playlist during sync and use the tracks from that one call on any playlists that references them.

[raybeau528]

See http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... =2&t=37264 for a script that may meet your needs.

Ray