### Jukebox Shuffle Overview

This program uses song ratings (1 to 5 stars) you assigned in Windows Media Player to generate shuffled playlists, with higher rated songs played more often than lower rated songs, while also preventing the same song from repeating too close together. You specify how much more often to play higher rated songs.

For a general idea of how the Jukebox Shuffle works, browse the Quick Start instructions. It could turn out to be the only topic you need to read, and you can figure out the rest without this help.

From the Jukebox Shuffle Main Window, you open an Add Songs window. In that you select what songs to put the shuffle. You can choose all your songs, or specify playlists and genres. You can limit any of those selections to new songs added within the last whatever number of days. You also choose how often to play songs depending on the song rating you assigned (number of stars). You can add several of these groups to the same shuffle if you like.

All the songs selected above are combined into one playlist, including repetitions of songs. That playlist is then shuffled with the options you choose. The default option distributes repetitions evenly (with some random variation), by counting how many times each song occurs in the playlist, and then putting the song at one random place in each of equal segments in the playlist. Alternatively, you can choose to only modify an ordinary shuffle, by setting some minimum number of songs before the same song can play again.

If you ran an ordinary shuffle on a playlist that has multiple repetitions of your favorite songs, those songs would of course play more often. Unfortunately, normal random variation would sometimes put most or all the occurrences of a repeated song close together, even playing the same song twice in a row, with other long stretches of the playlist where you never hear the song. This program was written to solve that problem.