This stems from a need I had which I didn't see satisfactorily addressed in Amarok so I went ahead and coded it up in a command-line style and now I was wondering if there was any appetite for this kind of thing amongst the Amarok Dev/User community.

I have a portable music device with less storage than I have music. I like to refresh what's on the mobile fairly frequently. The low tech way to do this would obviously be to delete everything on it and manually drag a bunch of new tracks over. This is rather tedious to do for anything more than a few files. What I needed was a way to broadly say 'tracks like this but not like this' and simply press a button to have the generated playlist transferred to the device. Sounding like a smart playlist so far ?

The problem as I see it in smart playlists right now is that there's little room for 'jitter'. If I don't select Rock I don't get *any* rock. I'd quite like the possibility of having a few random choices thrown into the mix. Here's my solution:

Instead of a strict match you are able to specify an increased or decreased probability of a track appearing in the playlist. So you say you like Motorhead, for instance, and behind the scenes all Motorhead tracks get scored +1. You say you hate Country so all country tracks get scored -1. Obviously you could do this for all criteria currently accepted by the smart playlist dialog. Once you're finished you click Ok and your entire collection is scanned and scored and a *weighted random* list is generated in which it's more likely that artists/genres/whatever you like are included but there's still the possibility that you'll get a nice random surprise. Also each time you generated the list from the same set of criteria you would get a different list that still favoured the things you like.

Also I'd allow a size rather than a number of tracks limit to be specified. And perhaps a script to transfer the whole lot to your device doing whatever transcoding you specify as suitable for that device.

Like I said.. I already have the engine for this but it's only really usable by hackers and the like. Text file editing to set the weights.

Anyway.. have I developed something that already exists and if I didn't is it something anyone else but me would have a use for ?

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