Hello all!

I am having some trouble making a way for amarok to play all my collection in random order. I simply have too much music for a media player to handle (last entire library scan took amarok a little over 4 days), so i create smaller library slices and feed them to amarok. I would like to be able to random play the entire collection without (or with if necessary) using a playlist. (partially because I cant figure out how to randomly play a playlist I created.

Here is the state of my amarok 2 (new install June 4, 2009 - ubuntu j 9.04)
**on a macbook**
-no intelligent playlists (inferred that I should maybe have some more from my research into this problem)
-have the proportional and fuzy biases (wonderful things, how do i change the number of tracks they generate == solution)!!!
-have 10,000 songs in this slice.


any suggestions on how I could go about playing randomly my entire library?

Thanks

(from an amarok newly converted who has frustratedly tried everything from WMP11, iTunes, MediaMonkey, MediaCenter, Rhythmbox, Exhaile, VLC, foobar2000, WINAMP, and a couple others....)---

----Max


(Also, what is a good forum or place for one to make suggestions on useablitly of amarok, I find it inadequately insufficient in various regions... but compared to all the others, amarok has the most promising future)


***EDIT****

also where could I find documentation on the collection bit of amarok, or just amarok in its entirety, not really looking for the regular users guide book or howto, more akin to a man page possibly, atleast interms of depth.

How many tracks are in your collection, that it needed 4 days to scan? That is very unusual.
Hope, you don't use Amarok 2.0.2 which comes with Jaunty. If so, please update to 2.1.
Playing your collection randomly can be done with a dynamic playlist. Just enable it and fill it without setting any biases. At the moment, the only way to set the tracks displayed is to change the source code.

The forum for your suggestions is here.

The documentation for A2 is a bit outdated, but should be more up-to-date soon.
Perhaps you should also read the developers' blogs.

Greetings
m0nk

maxmoulds wrote:-no intelligent playlists (inferred that I should maybe have some more from my research into this problem)
-have the proportional and fuzy biases (wonderful things, how do i change the number of tracks they generate == solution)!!!

You can't change the number of tracks generated, it's just not part of the current design to take into account the desire to use the bias engine to create a static playlist.

It's been discussed in the forums before and some indication was given that one of the developers had some ideas relating to the UI for static playlists, don't know what kind of time frame they were looking at, or if that included anything relating to having an option to use the dynamic playlist stuff to generate a static playlist.

Don't know if it is the best place for it, but these kind of things often seem to be discussed in the usability section of the forum. It's a bit hard to define what is a usability issue sometimes, most requests, bugs, etc... are probably better discussed in the general discussion part of the forum.

There is also bugzilla, but if you intend on filing a wishlist bug, it might still be suggested to discuss it in the forums first, depending on what it is.

If you just want it to randomly play your entire collection, you can turn on the dynamic playlist, don't define any rules and it should happen, no muss no fuss. Don't know what the state of Amarok is on the Mac.

If you have a static playlist you want to randomly play tracks from, there should be an option for it on the playlist menu, personally I would rather have a shuffle option, but that's another story. 

Later, Seeker