Jukebox Shuffle - Add Songs window
This window is opened when you click the "Add a song group..." button from the main window. In this window you select a group
of songs to be added to the shuffle, and specify how often to play them. You can
open this window multiple times, to add multiple song groups to the
shuffle.
The same window is also opened when you click the "Edit selected
item" button from the main window, but then with
the options from the earlier selection already filled in, which you can change
as desired.
Songs to be added to the shuffle
At the top of this section there are two radio button options for what songs
to add to the shuffle:
- The default first option is to add all songs to the shuffle. These are all
the songs that are listed in Windows Media Player under Library > Music
> All Music.
- One or more playlists you previously created and/or genres, which you select from the list
next to the option button.
The list is of playlists in Windows Media Player's database. Any playlist
you created in WMP is automatically in the database; a playlist might not be
in the database if you created it with a different program and saved it in a
folder that WMP doesn't scan.
The checkbox at the bottom of the section modifies whichever selection you
chose above. It filters that selection to include only songs recently added to
the Windows Media Player's library, with the maximum age you specify.
Note: this age is the number of days since the song was added to Windows
Media Player's database, not necessarily the same as how long they've been
on your computer. If you haven't used WMP before, it won't have the songs in
its database until the first time it runs and scans the contents of your
"Music" folder.
How often (times per cycle) to play songs from the group/playlist selected
- The default option, first radio button, is to have different frequencies of
songs depending on the rating (number of stars) you assigned to them in Windows
Media Player, with higher rated songs normally set to play more often than low
rated songs.
Underneath the radio button for this option, there are spinners
where you can set how often to play songs with each of the five ratings. It's
for your preference how much more often you want to have higher rated songs
play. The Tips on Repetition Frequency and Song Ratings
topic may be helpful for deciding what repetition frequencies to set.
This method should be appropriate for most cases. If you never use this
feature, you could probably shuffle just as well with less effort without this
program, directly in Windows Media Player or your MP3 player.
- The second option is to play all songs just as often, regardless of song
rating. It includes a spinner where you can set the number of plays per cycle.
This method may be good for a small group. of songs that you add to a shuffle
that also includes a larger group. For example your shuffle already
includes All Songs, with the play frequency based on each song's rating, but you
also have a small playlist of of your favorite songs (a subset of the 5-star rated
songs) that you want to play even more often than the 5-star rate. You could add
that playlist to the shuffle and set all songs in the playlist to play the same
number of times (in addition to how often they already play as 5-star rated
songs in the All Songs selection).
- The third option, to exclude those songs from the selection, only works
where you've already selected other songs to play. The excluded songs will
not be in the final playlist even if they are in a song group selected for
the shuffle.
For example, if you want a random selection of all the songs in your
collection except Hip Hop, you would first select "All songs" to
play at the desired frequencies. Then you would make a second selection for
genre "Hip Hop" and choose Exclude.
The checkbox to "Ignore repeat occurrences of the same song..."
means that if any song occurs more than once in your selection (e.g. two
playlists that both include the same song), it will only play as often as if it
occurred only once (according to the frequency you set for songs with that
rating).