Re: Shuffling and unshuffling (was Re: ID3 tag question)

On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 12:23:36PM -0600, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 09:45:37AM -0800, dean blackketter wrote:
> > I'm opposed to full random (as opposed to shuffle).
> Fair enough.  Nobody but me has had anything good to say about it and
> even I would be just as happy with 'reshuffle on startup' and 'reshuffle
> at end of playlist' as I would be with full random.

I've been waiting for a good point to jump in, and this seems to be it.
In general I prefer non-random play, but there are two key points I feel
I must make in defense of Dave's ideas: 1) When I want to hear "random"
music, I want to hear all the songs, I want to be able to see the the
context around the song I'm listening to, like artist and album, and I
want to be able to go forward and back logically, even when I
arbitrarily click on a song to play now, then want to go back to where I
was. This is essentially the winamp/xmms behavior, and the key is that
your "playlist" is the ordering of songs that YOU selected, not the
server, and it doesn't change. This alows me to easily scan (visually)
the playlist and say "Oh, this song is from the middle of album X by Y".
I understand the benefits of displaying the shuffled playlist, but I
think that these are two separate uses of the player. That is why
winamp/xmms separate the ideas of "play randomly" (which apparently
creates a stack of already played songs) and "shuffle playlist". It is
likely that most people will use only one of these systems at a time, but
I think that there are enough people in both camps to warrant this as a
feature. 2) "Play randomly" with a stack of played songs would solve the
problem I stated earlier this week about adding new songs to (what is
today) a shuffled playlist. In "play randomly" mode, the new songs would
get added to the end of the Playlist (which I define, remember?), but
the would all get played because they aren't in the "Already played,
don't play again" stack.

I've always not been a huge fan of Shuffle mode, although I use it
frequently. This discussion has caused me to understand why: I think
that shuffling the playlist and playing randomly are two distinct, valid
ideas. I agree that we don't want to change the UI drastically from
under the users' feet, but I think that these two things can live
harmoniously together. 

-will

> 
> > I'm also opposed to reshuffling at the end of the playlist.

Agreed (the Playlist should never change without you changing it), but
with Random Play you'd just have to clear the stack once you've played
everything and things would work perfectly.
 
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---------Will McDonald-----------------will-TFaeeA7fOO4cYzUW3nBFdvj1EjU76JnwloudME1CUYE@public.gmane.org
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