Shuffle Playlist?

[troycarpenter]

After reading another post, I decided to try the shuffle playlist feature. However, I'm not getting a playlist at all. What I get is the "Now Playing" screen with a message in the window that says "Shuffle list is loading..."

Here's what I do:

1. Go to Library
2. Press the shuffle button at the top
3. Leave start and end year blank
4. Select a genre from the pull-down list
5. Hit ok.
6. Observe Now Playing screen with "Shuffle list is loading..." message. No songs ever populate.

I tried entering years in step 3, but the same result happened.

If I go back to the library and pick a song that is NOT in my cache, it downloads and plays as expected.

[daneren2005]

Clear the app out of memory, try it again, then send me a log after 20-30 seconds of it not working. I need to know what error it is throwing to not show up.

[daneren2005]

I would also suggest you check what folder you have selected. For example when I have my folder set to one with only movies, I get nothing back. That is a limitation of the server though which I can't work around.

[troycarpenter]

I think a lot of my issues are sometimes because I've never used a feature before and perhaps don't know how to use it properly.

For instance, I have found that it greatly helps if I go into Now Playing and do a Remove All command. I then got it to be more reliable. Also, I went in and set the playlist number to be 1000 (which leads to a later question), I see that the playlist populates over time...meaning I got about 150+ songs right away, but watching the counter it eventually crept up to 1000.

The times I did get the playlist stuck with the "Shuffle list is loading" message, I waited about a minute, then went to the "send logs". The logs were empty so I didn't send.

Now the question: I'm assuming the the random playlist does not contain duplicates (hard to tell when the list is 1000 long). Particularly I want to know that it's not filling up the playlist with duplicates because that's the number I put in the settings. Answering my own question, I don't think that's the case because I just tried a genre that has only 10 songs in my library and only those showed up, not 1000.

So now that I've been hitting this feature hard, I'm getting lists more times than not. I'm no longer sure there's a problem here.

[daneren2005]

That number is how many songs it will try to have in your play list by default. There is a limit to how many songs can be loaded at once through the API, so it will not load that many. I would suggest setting something much lower then 1000, as it really doesn't provide any benefit and can possibly slow things down. It shouldn't be doing duplicates close together, though with such a high setting it is possible you are getting random duplicates in there. How random the playlists are completely depends on how random the server is sending. It seems to not do that great of a job TBH. I usually see 5-6 songs from the same album even though I literally thousands of albums to choose from. It happens way too frequently for me to think it's doing an even distribution over the short term, but I don't think I've ever seen it repeat the songs. It just tends to group them in a non-random manner.

[troycarpenter]

I like large playlists, I tend to just load them up and let them go. For the randomly created list, I suppose you could hit the random button again in Now Playing once they are all loaded and get another level of randomness. 1000 songs didn't actually take more than ten seconds to fully populate. Also, after enough testing, the 1000 (or 20 in the default case) is the upper limit, not the absolute number. If there are only two songs in the selected genre, then you will only get two songs. I have plenty of genres that have way more than 1000 songs.

Code: Select all

1,402 all artists
706 album artists
2,073 albums
47 genres
15,596 songs
0 videos
0 podcasts
745 audiobooks
81.68 GB (~ 1,102 hours)

Actually, according to that report I have way too many genres for my taste...gonna have to trim those down.

The only client I've ever seen have an issue with the number of songs in a playlist saved on the server is the Roku Subsonic client. It will simply not load if the list is too large, although I don't know what that limit is.

[daneren2005]

I like large playlists, I tend to just load them up and let them go. For the randomly created list, I suppose you could hit the random button again in Now Playing once they are all loaded and get another level of randomness. 1000 songs didn't actually take more than ten seconds to fully populate. Also, after enough testing, the 1000 (or 20 in the default case) is the upper limit, not the absolute number. If there are only two songs in the selected genre, then you will only get two songs. I have plenty of genres that have way more than 1000 songs.

Code: Select all

1,402 all artists
706 album artists
2,073 albums
47 genres
15,596 songs
0 videos
0 podcasts
745 audiobooks
81.68 GB (~ 1,102 hours)

Actually, according to that report I have way too many genres for my taste...gonna have to trim those down.

The only client I've ever seen have an issue with the number of songs in a playlist saved on the server is the Roku Subsonic client. It will simply not load if the list is too large, although I don't know what that limit is.

In case you are unaware, 1000 shouldn't be necessary because as you listen to music, it automatically removes songs at the front and adds ones on the back. The option is really just there for people who want to load enough music to be able to go a couple of hours with no internet, not to try to front load an entire genres worth of music. You can of course do whatever you want with it since it does seem to work for you. Just note I made some improvements in the apk I sent you (for someone else already) to load more at once if you have a higher level set. This improvement is not present in the current Beta on the Play Store.

On a complete side note, where did you get that report from? Is it from within Subsonic? I notice it labels Audio Books. I know that there is a label for Audio Books in the data Subsonic sends, but I have as of yet not figured out how it determines what is a Audio Book or not. Is there a tag for it or something? I want to know because I enabled auto bookmarking of Audio Books based off that data, but I have no idea how to 1) test that it works and 2) actually use it for myself.

[troycarpenter]

I wasn't aware of how that works. Very interesting. I will try that out and see.

I actually use Madsonic as my server. On the left side, just above the playlists, there are two selections. The first says "Show Statistics" and it shows the list I posted. The second says "Advanced Statistics" and displays graphs in the right side. The graphs are as follows:

# of albums per folder
# of audio files per folder
Total size of the files per folder
# Video files per folder
Total size of video files per folder
# Podcasts per folder
Total size of podcasts per folder
#Audiobooks per folder
Total size of audobooks per folder.

I think the # of audiobooks is misleading because that is the cumulative of all the chapters (I broke my books into separate MP3 files per chapter as appropriate). For instance, in the first graph listed above, it says I only have 24 distinct Audiobook "Albums" in my audiobook folder, where the album corresponds to a book based on the MP3 tags. I believe Madsonic is picking up the "Audiobook" genre tag to count those. I have books like the Hobbit, LOTR, and some others with lots of chapters.

[daneren2005]

Well that makes me happy that at least Madsonic users will be able to auto bookmark audio books then! I will have to keep looking if there is a definite way to make Subsonic mark them as well.

[troycarpenter]

BTW, I noticed one of my recently listened-to audiobooks had a bookmark icon in its listing. I loaded the track and sure enough it asked if I wanted to resume from a time-offset in the file, which I presume is where I stopped listening last time.

Great work!