Need a music playback feature maybe

[zoundz]

A little addition I'd like to see for music playback. There is a menu entry to play all songs. All well and good. Unlike the (forgive me for mentioning it) iPod, there appears to be no way to mark a song, artist, album, etc, to exclude it from the play all songs queue. I have a lot of mp3's and when I tell it to just shuffle play them all, I really don't want the tv themes, sound effects, radio shows, etc. to play. Nice to have an option to mark things to exclude them from playing automatically. I really don't want to put them in a separate directory tree to accomplish this.

Just a thought.

Either that or tell me where I missed how to do that already as I so often seem to do.

[GKusnick]

I suppose the thinking is that Play All should actually mean play them all. I don't see a problem with that (although it's not a feature I would use very often).

If what you want is to play less than all, you could presumably create a playlist containing those items you do want to play, and shuffle that. Generally speaking, positive logic (list the items you want) seems preferable to negative logic (mark the items you don't want).

Windows Media Player has tools for creating query-based playlists and then saving the results as regular playlists. I'm not an iTunes expert, but maybe it has some similar capability. That could be a fairly simple way to get what you want (i.e. a list of everything except those categories you want to exclude) without having to list all the items manually.

[zoundz]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

If what you want is to play less than all, you could presumably create a playlist containing those items you do want to play, and shuffle that. Generally speaking, positive logic (list the items you want) seems preferable to negative logic (mark the items you don't want).

While I agree with you, fundamentally, I see a need for both approaches. A playlist with thousands of songs might be a bit hard to handle on a menu driven system. It just seems to me that adding a simple flag to the wiz.bin entry that says "don't include this in <play all>" doesn't seem all that problematical. You, of course, are free to not use this feature if it's implemented.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by zoundz

You, of course, are free to not use this feature if it's implemented.

DB format changes affect everybody, whether they use the feature or not. So if you're going to add capabilities to the DB, it makes sense to try to make them as general as possible. That's why I'm suggesting that some sort of dynamic playlist scheme would be better than a narrow "exclude from Play All" flag. So for instance you could define playlist "Play All" to be all the items that lack the "Exclude from Play All" custom tag. This gets you want you want, without a dedicated DB flag, plus it also allows for more than one dynamic list, with different inclusion and exclusion rules.

[zoundz]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

That's why I'm suggesting that some sort of dynamic playlist scheme would be better than a narrow "exclude from Play All" flag. So for instance you could define playlist "Play All" to be all the items that lack the "Exclude from Play All" custom tag. This gets you want you want, without a dedicated DB flag, plus it also allows for more than one dynamic list, with different inclusion and exclusion rules.

I guess I missed something. Exactly when did you suggest anything other than creating a playlist with all the songs I wanted in it. The idea of using a custom ID3 tag is not totally awful, IMHO, but there are so many programs that blindly mess with the tags that it can be problematical. I can't imagine how an added flag in wiz.bin would cause anyone any problems if they don't actually set the flag. There must be some "reserved for future use" bits in there somewhere that are always zero currently. Using something like that would have absolutely no impact on those people who choose not to use the feature.

It was just a thought. I guess I'll just not use Play All. Too bad.