One of my most loved Amarok features are dynamic playlists. For those who don´t know how they work a little guide is availible.
I use a tweaked random for my dynamic playlist. Amarok is told to play music from a smart playlist which contains all the songs I rated with more than 3 stars or did not rate at all. I don´t want to listen to music I have listened to within the last month. So I exclude that as well. This makes my smart playlist. In Amarok it looks like this:
And now I use that as a seed for a dynamic playlist to make Amarok add and remove songs from my actual playlist and by doing this keeping it tidy, small and going on playing music for weeks if I want it to without me ever having to add or remove songs from the playlist (great for parties btw). If I feel like playing a certain song I can of course always just drag it into the playlist and play it. In Amarok my dynamic playlist looks like this:
And this is the result 🙂
I am pretty sure others out there use even cooler and more useful dynamic playlists. Please share. What do you tell Amarok to play for you?
Thanks to pointing out this link. I was looking for a feature like this a while ago but, I don’t know why, never found this page. So I was doing with a simple script and some dcop call but this is much more powerful.
I guess Amarok will be my favorite player for a long time. 🙂
I’ve had problems with Amarok not being “random enough” – ie, I can hear the same song twice in the same day in a collection of 3k+ songs.
My smart playlist was almost identical to yours except for the “not listened to within the past month” part – I’m going to have to add that and I think that will solve most of my problems with Amarok for now 🙂 Thanks!
I use a setup much like yours, but instead of having one smart playlist for “good” music I have multiple.
One list for 5 stars, one list for 4.5 or more stars, one for 4 stars, and so on to 2.5 stars.
This way the highest rated music is included more often than the lowest rated music.
If I wouldn’t do it this way the few tracks that get the maximum of 5 stars would rarely be played, because I have so many more songs in the 2.5-3.5 range.
@Caspar: sweetness – I might try that 🙂
Wait a second, that is exactly my amarok setup – even with songs from the Mixed Tapes! 😉
OK, I had to exclude songs with “xmas” in the folder-name.
Great! For some reason I had totally missed this feature, and wondered how to customize that “50 random tracks” playlist.
Thanks for the tip, and now I have yet another reason to stick to my opinion that Amarok beats the living daylights out of every other audioplayer on the planet!
playlists suck…album listeners for the win!
Hi. I just read about this blog post and liked the idea very much. A copy of your setup is driving my amarok now. Thanks a lot for posting.
casper, see the first (and only 🙂 ) tip in the walkthrough – you can make it choose higher rated/scored tracks automatically. whether it provides the same proportions your current setup does – that i do not know.
Thanks for the tip, but I tried that, and it didn’t work. It would probably work if you have the same number of songs in each category. But I don’t, I have much more average songs, then high rated songs.
For the fun of it I loaded my stats in Matlab to do a bit of analysis. You can read it at my blog entry about Matlab & Amarok
I tried this with Amarok 1.4.8 with the exception that I only want songs with a rating above 2.5 but the Dynamic Playlist that uses this Smart Playlist does not work.
The Dynamic Playlist appears to select songs of any rating and freezes Amarok while it is populating the playlist.
I even tried moving the “Rating is greater than 2.5 – OK” from “Match Any” to “Match All”.
Hi!!
Nice Post. It’s the same i do!! I actually do it for keeping all the songs of my library with almost the same times heared. I was really happy until i tried Amarok2. I couldn’t find this feature. It has, of course, dynamic playlists. But i can’t find how to tell him i don’t wanna hear songs with less tan 4 weeks heard. I know it’s still a beta release but, do you know if it is possible right know?
Thanks in advance…
It is unfortunately not possible yet. We are working on it.
Thanks for answering lydia.
I think you’re (do you really work in amarok’s development team?, COOL!!) doing an amzing work with this player.
I hope it become finished soon.