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I know in iTunes and a few other apps you can get playlists for just "highly rated" songs, but that's not quite what I want. I want to hear the lower-rated stuff, too. If I didn't like the song at some level it wouldn't be in my library in the first place, and so even a one-star song is worth the occasional listen.

However, I do want to hear five-star songs a lot more often than one-star songs, even though I think I have a lot more one-star songs in my music library. So does anyone know of media player software or plugin (preferrably free) that has a shuffle mode that is biased towards songs that are rated higher, without completely excluding those that are rated lower?

Right now I prefer windows media player, so a plugin for that would be ideal, but I'm not married to media player, either. Any music software that will do this would be worth some attention.

quack quixote
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Joel Coehoorn
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5 Answers5

4

Try 'Shaken, not stirred'. I had the same question as you did and this little freeware programme offers exactly what I wanted.

Zibellino
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Roet P. Toet
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2

In "iTunes DJ" (formerly "Party Shuffle"), click "Settings" and check "Play higher rated songs more often."

iTunes DJ settings

(This is not the same as the "Smart Playlists" mentioned in the question... it will still play low-rated/unrated songs.)

Gareth
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coneslayer
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1

The only program I've heard of that does this is LongPlayer. It was really slick and was made to do exactly what you are looking for. It seems to be abandoned, but was designed to work in conjunction with Winamp, iTunes, and XMMS. It may work with current versions of those programs.

Since it's open source, it may be possible to tear out the guts and try to reuse them in plugins for current programs.

afrazier
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1

You can get the effect of a biased shuffle by creating a group of smart playlists.

  • Create a playlist of 50 randomly selected five-star songs
  • Another of 25 three-star songs
  • And finally a playlist consisting of the first two playlists.

Now the last playlist will have a 5-star to 3-star song bias of 2:1.

Kitt Basch
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0

iTunes has an obvious bias. Not saying I want it to :/ but I came across this because it is a problem for me and realized it could be a solution for you. It's not specifically for that purpose of course as shuffle is to mean shuffle but I have over 5000 songs and hear about the same 100-200 songs just because I choose them often when I do choose specific songs to listen to instead of shuffling. So when it shuffles it makes sure to throw those in there the most

user304173
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