lots of music, how to play it all randomly?

[roscored1000]

HiI am using my SB Touch through a wired/wireless home network in conjunction with a Synology DS411+, using their SB server software. I have about 20,000 files and they are in albums and no real order. I would like to play the lot randomly without having to create playlists for it all. I like surprises with my music listening. I there a way to do this? Any suggestions will be gratefully received. thanks

[aubuti]

Welcome to the forums. Lots of options for random playing, and that was definitely one of the most fun things for me when I got my first Squeezebox -- rediscovering all kinds of great music I had completely forgotten I had.

In more or less increasing order of complexity (and perhaps satisfaction):

0. Shuffle play - just use the shuffle play option. An incredibly inefficient way to random mix. It can tax your server, lead to unresponsive ui, etc. I don't recommend it.

1. RandomMix - a standard plugin that comes with Squeezebox Server (SBS). In the setup you can select particular genres to include in the mix. A good way of keeping holiday tracks, comedy tracks, etc out of the general mix.

2. DynamicPlaylists & SQLPlaylist - plugins from Erland that give much more flexibility in selecting genres to include or EXclude, allow you to set up simple or complex SQL queries based on artists, genre, year of recording, ratings (see TrackStat below) and other characteristics in the files' metadata tags.

3. TrackStat & CustomSkip - more plugins from Erland's "suite". I don't use these so I don't know much about them, but they integrate with DynamicPlaylists & SQLPlaylist. TrackStat keeps track of your ratings for different tracks, how often they've been played, etc so that you can build a random playlist of most frequently played tracks, tracks that haven't been played in a long time, etc. CustomSkip "makes it possible to skip tracks with low ratings, zapped tracks, short tracks and much more."

4. MusicIP & Spicefly Sugarcube - In my opinion the best playlist generator for SB. It uses "fingerprints" of your tracks based on musical analysis, rather than only the standard tag metadata. Then you can set parameters for how much variety you want. It's like Pandora or last.fm for your own music library. It is somewhat dead-end software, as the company was bought out and the new owner appears to be more interested in business-to-business than end-users. Configuring MusicIP to integrate with SBS can be a little bit of a black art, but there are good guides in the wiki (wiki.slimdevices.com). Spicefly is a nice enhancement to MusicIP, a bit more dynamic in its track selection to allow you to do an interesting semi-random walk through your music library.
.

[GeeJay]

Virtually all of my listening is through random playlists. You should really check out Erland's suite of plug-ins, as they allow you to do a lot more than just the standard random play that comes with SBS. My most common random playlist uses an SQL Playlist template(also requires Dynamic Playlist). The playlist is weighted towards songs I've rated more highly (requires TrackStat), and skips Classical and Holiday genres (using Custom Skip).

I also have random playlists for decades (e.g., Sixties, Seventies), holiday music, etc.

The primary reason I chose Squeezebox is because of the power of the plug-ins that allow me to customize my listening experience in virtually any way I want. Hopefully, you'll find the same. Best of luck!

[roscored1000]

thanks for that, i will enjoy [?] playing. thanks for the info and feedback.

[roscored1000]

hi again i was having a look at the server pages and found the plugin list with the afore mentioned 'random mix' or similar and that it was ticked but i cant find it anywahere on the unit or in the mysqueezebox.com settings not anything about plugins, where do they hide so i can access them. thanks

[toby10]

hi again i was having a look at the server pages and found the plugin list with the afore mentioned 'random mix' or similar and that it was ticked but i cant find it anywahere on the unit or in the mysqueezebox.com settings not anything about plugins, where do they hide so i can access them. thanks

Plugins are not usable (nor will they be seen) on MySqueezeBox.com, you can only utilize Plugins running SqueezeBox Server (SBS) on your computer.
After installing the Plugin many are located in SBS > Extras

[aubuti]

You'll find settings for SQLPlaylist under Extras on the SBS web ui. But for RandomMix you have to look under My Music > Random Mix. For DynamicPlaylists you can find the settings under Settings > Plugins.

[roscored1000]

thanks once again, great unit by the way isnt it?

[GeeJay]

thanks once again, great unit by the way isnt it?

Yes, it is. Enjoy

[justpassinthru]

I use Media Monkey Gold to rip. I can quickly and easily create playlists from my NAS library with MM and store them in a common directory. I then fire up the SB Server on my PC and rescan for Playlists only. BaDa Boom BaDa Bing, the Playlists show up on my Touch. Creating your own Playlists will somewhat minimize the "surprises" you enjoy, but MM lets you create Playlists by Artist, Album, Composer, Genre, Year, Rating, etc.. With 20K tunes I doubt that will be a big issue.