How to Random?

[mr_doles]

So we had the in-laws over the house today for Thanksgiving.  I went to random play settings, Enabled Random Play, Selected Audio only, checked use Selected Genres, selected Holiday and hit the > to add it to the list.  I hit save settings and a Christmas song started, when it finished another one played.  Pleased with myself I left the room.  10 minutes later my wife came running in and said Nelly was playing and swearing.  I ran in and hit next song and Poison came on.  I shut down, restarted and created a Holiday playlist loaded it into queue and shuffled it.

Now that everyone is gone I have been playing around with random and can't get a holiday song to even play.  I am missing a step here?

[bzpilot]

I had a little trouble trying to understand this too.   This is what I believe I came up with.

All the selections at the top Audio, Video etc - will random play those whole databases.

When you have the random play by genre selected it has nothing to do with the top selections.  It will play all video, audio, and karaoke from that genre.  I think it was setup this way because originally the filters for genre, artist and year were being used specifically for audio only.  To use the specific genre(s) correctly I believe you need to unselect everything up top.  I think it'll work the way you want then.

I brought up the idea of having the top selections blocked out if useing specific genre(s), artist(s), or year(s).  I think it would be less confusing that way. 

[mr_doles]

I knew that I had to be missing something.  Thanks that worked like a charm.

[Barcrest]

The reason you can still pick the top row is because if you pick audio so it will play anything from audio but you might want to have more of a bias to say christmas so you will also want to select genre. If you just had the genre then all the random music would be christmas however having them both enabled should lead to the random having more christmas mixed in.

Utlimately i want to add weighting to the selections, i might get a weighting system in for the next release.

[bzpilot]

The reason you can still pick the top row is because if you pick audio so it will play anything from audio but you might want to have more of a bias to say christmas so you will also want to select genre. If you just had the genre then all the random music would be christmas however having them both enabled should lead to the random having more christmas mixed in.

Utlimately i want to add weighting to the selections, i might get a weighting system in for the next release.

Now, it even makes more sense to me.  Because when I had AUDIO selected and a couple genres selected I could tell those genres seemed to play more but everything else was playing too.  I think I finally understand how all the random play stuff works - now would be a good time to change it up!