Back in the 1.x series of Amarok, I could manage my entire listening experience with Amarok without doing a single thing - because Amarok scores tunes based on how often you listened to them all the way through.

Which of course it does now. I use a fuzzy bias that says the songs I want to hear have a score of 100.

Except the scoring doesn't appear to get processed until you have listened to a portion of the song. This means that I have songs that I really would prefer to heard only once in a while, so most of the time I skip them. Their playcount stays the same, and because they have played a few times, their score is 100. Which means they come up frequently. So the songs I want to play the least end up in my play list just as frequently as songs that I like.

The other part of my music management in the 1.4 series was to prioritise songs that had been recently added. Ie their playcount is low.

So I get a new CD, add it to my collection, and my dynamic list says "If the playcount is low or the score is high, play the song".

Of course, many people like to know how many times they have actually played a song, not how many times the song began, and so what was being counted in playcount changed.

So now if I prioritise low playcount songs, I do indeed get my new CD, but also every song that I have skipped a lot.

When I saw the "First Played" option, I thought I was on to a winner - perhaps I could say "First Played Never or First Played Today" as a fuzzy option, so that new songs would fit. But the date is an absolute date, rather than a relative date, which surprised me.

Does anyone have any tips on how I can get "Songs I like or Songs that are new" in a dynamic list? A count of how many times a song was started would help immensely.

paulkoan wrote:Except the scoring doesn't appear to get processed until you have listened to a portion of the song. This means that I have songs that I really would prefer to heard only once in a while, so most of the time I skip them. Their playcount stays the same, and because they have played a few times, their score is 100. Which means they come up frequently. So the songs I want to play the least end up in my play list just as frequently as songs that I like.

Since you are comparing to Amarok 1.4.x: this was exactly the same behaviour in the old version Don't filter by playcount, but by score.

paulkoan wrote:Does anyone have any tips on how I can get "Songs I like or Songs that are new" in a dynamic list? A count of how many times a song was started would help immensely.

The best solution would be a filter on when the track was added instead of a playcount, or just filter by rating, since new tracks have no rating yet.

Other filter options will be added to the Dynamic Playlists, it's just a matter of time and developer avaliablilty. If a bias option is not present yet, you can use the filter option in the CollectionBrowser instead and create a static playlist for the time being