amarok isnt random enough

Message

swooshOnLn · Post by **swooshOnLn** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:44 am

Ok. How can I make amaroks "random" more random? It seems there is over a 30% chance that the songs going to be from the same artist as the last played song, and about 50% of my "random" songs are Incubus (Incubus is NOT the majority of my songs, its not even 20% of my playlist)

adekoba · Post by **adekoba** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:51 am

If one artist (with like 5 albums) is near 20% of your music library, there's not much for amarok to choose from. Maybe get some more music?

swooshOnLn · Post by **swooshOnLn** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:53 am

Well, I have over 1,800 other albums to choose from (no joke), but the play list is a small collection of songs I like to listen to before I shower and get ready for the night.

I know that some programs have a feature to make sure the next random file isn't by the same artist. Any way I can add this, or possibly theres a plug in?

Shan · Post by **Shan** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:54 am

I don't know how big your playlist is in comparison but I don't have any of the symptoms you describe, Granted my playlist is likely substantially higher than yours (unless you have a LOT of Incubus songs), regardless its possible you have amarok configured to favor songs with higher scores. My understanding of amaroks rating system is a little rusty but I *think* it is more likely to award a song a higher rating if you have A) a lot of songs by the same artist and B) you tend to listen to said artist fairly often. If, for example, Incubus is a sizable chunk of your collection, in theory they are more likely to have a higher rating than other artists with lower scores, which would inherently make them played more often.

At any rate, checkout Mode > Random > Favor to see if you have amarok set to favor a certain setting and play around with that. If it doesn't help (or its not the problem) the only other solution I can think of (short of recoding the programs "randomize" settings), is to load your playlist, turn random off (EG make it play in order) and then randomize the playlist (Either Playlist > Shuffle, or CTRL-H)

Most likely however, as dark_speedo said, if your playlist is as saturated with Incubus as it sounds, Amarok doesn't have a whole lot to work with.

EDIT: Read your second post.

Hrm, I normally keep my entire collection in the playlist, and when I want to listen to a few specifics I just queue them in

adekoba · Post by **adekoba** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 3:01 am

swooshOnLn wrote:Well, I have over 1,800 other albums to choose from (no joke), but the play list is a small collection of songs I like to listen to before I shower and get ready for the night.

I know that some programs have a feature to make sure the next random file isn't by the same artist. Any way I can add this, or possibly theres a plug in?

Well, random is random. Not: choose any other artist besides the previous one that was just played random. Make the playlist larger and there's a greater "random factor".

What's wrong with doing it by hand before you shower

mark_alec · Post by **mark_alec** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 6:27 am

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=124122 looks like it could be related. Otherwise this is an issue you should ask about upstream (ie. the Amarok devs)