The VideoLAN Forums

My music player spends its life on random play so the subject is quite important to my listening pleasure. When hard disk players first came out I bought the Sony Walkman and after some time I found that it played many of the same tracks again.

After contacting Sony and getting no joy I decided to try the IPod and have found that it is much the same so naturally I cursed them too.
But after thinking about it, it is an incredibly hard thing to get right; sure the programmers could make it play every track until they were all played and then start again in a different order.
Now if I have 2000 songs on my music player I would have to wait 1999 songs to hear that first one again, somehow has to be related to mood or something else.

It’s a conundrum!

First I catalog all the songs or video on a drive or folder.

This creates 2 lines of text for each. The first being the search criteria. For mp3 is uses the metadata and or file path. The 2nd line is the path to the song or video.

The app generates a random number between 1 and the end of the text file. It then does a search for a match. If I want to play a specific "country" or "rock" jandra I can. Otherwise I enter "photo" which is on line 1 all the time.

It searches for a maximum of 3 lines from the random start point then another random number is generated. This all happens very fast.

I then added the ability to randomly pick a start point and play for a few seconds. If I interrupt it, the whole song plays.

I recommend you run from a USB stick to reduce the wear and tear on your main drive or DVD player..

One other feature to random was added. Random by group. I can randomly play my golf video showing the swing from 2 camcorders. One fellow said some classical music is made up of a number of movements and hearing them together and randomly at the same time is a GREAT feature...