Audacious

Thanks, I'll do that.

There's another way to implement the desired feature, which I think will be very easy and even more useful:

The idea is add, unrelated to the current "shuffle flag", also an operation on playlist, to "shuffle" (randomly reorder) it. When I "shuffle" a specific playlist, the tracks in it will get permanently reordered in a random way. This ensures that as I play through that playlist, I do not get played the same songs again, and all we need to save on exit is the current position in the (reordered) playlist.

Another benefit of shuffling a playlist (instead of a shuffle flag) is that it allows some playlist to be shuffled, while others are not. I think this is an important feature - for some types of playlists (such a popular music) I usually want to shuffle them, but for other playlists, e.g., classical music, I often want to play by order. The current scheme where we have a global "shuffle flag" is annoying for this.

Finally, yet another benefit of shuffling (reordering) the playlist: when you look at the play list, you can immediately see what songs will play next. With the current shuffle, you know which song is currently playing, but can't see which songs played earlier or will play later.

So I think my suggestion is the best of all worlds :-)

John Lindgren wrote:

As a workaround, you can randomize the playlist and then play it in (now random) order, without shuffle enabled.

Nadav Har'El wrote:

The idea is add, unrelated to the current "shuffle flag", also an operation on playlist, to "shuffle" (randomly reorder) it. When I "shuffle" a specific playlist, the tracks in it will get permanently reordered in a random way. This ensures that as I play through that playlist, I do not get played the same songs again, and all we need to save on exit is the current position in the (reordered) playlist.

That feature has existed for years. Did you even read the comments above yours?

Sorry, I didn't notice this half-sentence in one of the comments, and I definitely did look for it in the software - I even looked several times in all the submenus and din't find it. But now I see it does exit - as Playlist > Sort -> Random Order. I guess it's not conspicuous enough :(

I'd like to have this behaviour (C pseudocode):

struct song {
    […]
    float near_play = 0.0;
};

// When playing the first song, use rand() % songcnt, not this function.
int select_next_song(struct song songs[], int songcnt,
    int previous_song, float ord)
{
    assert(ord >= 0.0 && ord < 1.0);

    for (int i = 0; i < songcnt; ++i)
        songs[i].near_play *= ord;
    songs[previous_song].near_play = 1.0;

    float all_near = 0.0;
    for (int i = 0; i < songcnt; ++i)
        all_near += 1.0 - songs[i].near_play;

    float rv = rand() / RAND_MAX;
    float p = 0.0;
    for (int i = 0; i < songcnt - 1; ++i) {
        float rarity = 1.0 - songs[i].near_play;
        p += rarity;
        if (rv <= p)
            return i;
    }
    return songcnt - 1;
}

• play B (33.3̅ % chance)
• A: 0, B: 1, C: 0
• A 50%, B 0%, C 50%
• play C
• A: 0, B: 0.5, C: 1
• A 66.6̅ , B 33.3̅ %, C 0
• play B
• A: 0, B: 1, C: 0.5
• A 66.6̅ %, B 0 %, C 33.3̅ %
  […]