Henno, I mostly agree that I would rarely want to listen to a given album randomized. Most artists put a lot of thought into the sequence of songs on an album, and some (like Pink Floyd) deliberately run the songs together in a coherent fashion. There are many albums which would be downright sacrelige to listen to out-of-order.

(However, there are some albums which work well with shuffle play. I've already mentioned "Apollo 18" by They Might Be Giants, which states specifically in the liner notes that it's intended to be shuffle-played. Also, many soundtrack albums are a mishmash collection of different songs where little or no thought has gone into the order of the tracks. But this is all beside the point, since it's not at the heart of our problem.)

In general, if I'm listening to the entire music collection from the root, then I usually want it shuffled. But if I choose a specific album, then I usually want to listen to it sequentially.

The idea of listening to an individual album sequentially but a collection of songs from those albums randomly is why I tried doing it that way in the first place, and why I was surprised when it didn't work.

In defense of the Empeg folks, your request for a "never randomize" option looks like it's in their future plans, and has been for some time. Just above the "always randomize" checkbox is another checkbox which seems like it would fit your bill. It's just grayed out for now until they implement that feature.

I mean, if you think about it, we're in a catch-22: To do what you and I want to do (randomize if we select the parent trees but don't randomize if we select an album), we currently have to maually turn Shuffle on and off each time we select a new playlist. But if we're going to have to do that anyway, why have the "always randomize" checkbox at all?

If we can assume that the "always randomize" checkbox has a purpose (i.e., it's there so that you don't have to manually activate shuffle for certain playlists), then how are we supposed to do what we want? Well, I see only two ways:

1) Turn on the Empeg's shuffle play, and set the "never randomize" flag on the albums we don't want shuffled. But this option does not exist yet. So we can't do that.

2) Turn off the Empeg's shuffle play, and set the "always randomize" flag on the parent playlists that we do want shuffled. But this doesn't work, as we've discovered. So we can't do that either.

There is another option, but it also results in a catch-22: You could create an "All tracks" playlist, set it to always shuffle, and copy all your songs into it. But if we have to do that, why do we even have heirarchical playlists at all?



-- Tony Fabris -- Empeg #144 --
Caution: Do not look into laser with remaining good eye.