### Tips on Repetition Frequency and Song Ratings

The point of Shaken, not stirred is to generate intelligently shuffled playlists where some songs are played more often according to your tastes, but the same song is prevented from repeating too soon after the last time it played. This topic deals with how to choose repetition frequencies and song ratings to generate random playlists suited to your preferences.

Why so such high frequency of 5-star songs? I don't want the same song to play 9 times.

The default repetition frequency rate of 9 (which you may choose to increase or decrease) for songs rated 5 stars only means that they will play 9 times as often as 1-star songs (with default frequency 1).

To achieve the desired difference in how often songs play, Shaken, not stirred initially generates a temporary playlist much longer than you're likely to use, with each song included however many times specified for songs with its rating. By default, that long shuffled playlist is truncated to a length that has exactly one copy of each of your most highly rated songs, with the likelihood of other songs being included depending on their rating.

How high a frequency (repetition rate) to set for each song rating?

That depends on how much more often you want to hear your favorite songs. Some people like to hear their favorite songs just a little more often than the rest; others like to hear their favorite songs every few days.

To get an idea how the number of repetitions translates to frequency of play, lets look at a heavily weighted example where for each higher rating level, where you doubled the play frequency for each higher star. Say you have 1000 songs in your library, with the number of songs assigned each rating as shown in the table below (which just happen to add up to round numbers). That results in a weighted playlist 3840 songs long (before it's trunctated to a random selection) - longer than most people would ever listen to start to end, but the length is necessary to get the frequency distribution.

Example Distribution of 1000 Songs
Rating (# of stars) | Number of repetitions per song | Number of songs with this rating | Total repetitions all songs w/ this rating (before truncating) | Song w/ this rating plays every how many songs | Plays every how many hours (4 min./song)
1 | 1 | 200 | 200 | 3840 | 256
2 | 2 | 300 | 600 | 1920 | 128
3 | 4 | 320 | 1280 | 960 | 64
4 | 8 | 140 | 1120 | 480 | 32
5 | 16 | 40 | 640 | 240 | 16

Suppose you listened to your player with this example distribution two hours a day, and songs were 4 minutes long on average. You'd hear each of your favorite 5-star songs every 8 days on average with some random variation, while you'd hear each of the 3-star songs about once a month and the 1-star songs once every four months. In comparison, with an unweighted distribution you'd hear every song about once a month (i.e. once every 67 hours of play).

If you shuffled 1000 songs with the above distribution, and truncated the final playlist (3840 songs long) with default option to whatever length has no songs repeated (240 songs in this example, about 16 hours long), each 5-star rated song would play in the truncated playlist 1 time, and a random subset of songs rated 1 to 4 stars would play once (with the higher rated among those more likely to be included, e.g. about half of the 4-star songs would be included).

This kind of distribution could make sense for someone who has some songs they never get tired of hearing; and others they usually skip, but don't delete because they know they like to hear them every few months. Others would choose a more even weighting of song frequencies.

Should 1-star songs always be set to 1 frequency? (or maybe 0 frequency?)

Not necessarily. If you want songs rated 1 star to play more than half as often as 2-star songs, you would need to increase the default repetitions. To have 1-star songs play two thirds as often as 2-star songs, you could increase 1-star songs to 2 repetitions and 2-star songs to 3 repetitions. In that case you'd probably also increase the repetitions of 3-star and higher songs, in order for their frequency of play to still be as much more often as before.
The frequency of play for a particular star rating isn't measured by the absolute size of its repetition rate; instead its determined by the ratio of its repetition rate compared to other star ratings. For example if you doubled the repetition rate of ALL the star ratings, all songs would still play just as often as before. The size of the temporary playlist that is shuffled before truncation does increase with the absolute size and thus takes longer to process, so it's wise to set the repetitions numbers at the lowest that can still get the desired ratios.

In some situations it would also make sense to set 1-star songs at 0 repetitions, i.e. never play. Some people might buy entire albums online, or rip all the songs on their CD's, but for many of those songs they never play them except when they're listening to an entire album. In that case the user could rate those songs as 1-star so they would never be included when Shaken, not stirred generates a shuffled playlist.
If you have a lot of songs that you don't plan to use in shuffled playlists and would rather not bother assigning ratings to them in WMP, you could set the default rating for unrated songs at 1-star in the Shuffle Options. That way you only need to assign ratings to songs you intend to include in shuffled playlists.

Setting repetition rates without using song ratings

Using song ratings for repetition rates is usually much easier, but you have the alternative of manually creating a playlist with the same songs included multiple times depending on how often you want them to play. When you select this playlist for the shuffle, set the frequency of play to 1 (same for all songs), and make sure the checkbox for "Ignore repeat occurrences of the same song..." is unchecked in the Add Songs to Shuffle window. The frequency of play refers to how often each entry in your playlist is played, regardless whether an entry is the same song as other entries in the playlist.

You might use a playlist with all the repetitions manually created in the playlist because you don't want to assign ratings to your songs, or because you want to vary the frequency of play more widely than just the 5 different song ratings. For the latter reason, it may be possible to achieve the same objective with less work, by using the ratings based frequency as a baseline and then adding a playlist with some songs you want played more often than the ratings based frequencies, like the example in the Beyond Quick Start topic.