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hechtus / squeezebox-googlemusic

Squeezebox (Logitech Media Server) Plugin for Google Play Music
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Randomly playing the library #53

Open mspertus opened 9 years ago

mspertus commented 9 years ago

(Moving discussion from Squeezebox forum).

On the Google Play app, it is easy to random play songs from your music library. There does not appear to be any way to do this in the googlemusic squeezebox plugin. Many people (like my daughter) regard this as core functionality of Google Play, so it would be great if the plugin could support this.

Thanks,

Mike

hechtus commented 9 years ago

Could you please exactly specify which button/knob are you using with the Android Google Music App? I'm not sure how you normally start random plays of your Library.

mspertus commented 9 years ago

Google Play/My Library/Songs and then press Shuffle All

hechtus commented 9 years ago

OK. Great! I will have a look.

mspertus commented 9 years ago

Thanks. To be more specific, just pressing "Shuffle All" starts the library playing. There is no need to press play.

mspertus commented 9 years ago

Thank you for the new release. This now works in the web interface, but I noticed it didn't work in iPeng. After posting in the iPeng support thread, Pippin responded that he thinks it is not implemented in the player interface as described below. Is this something you can address?

"OK, it's a I suspected: the plugin somehow does completely different stuff in the player interface (which iPeng uses) and the web interface. What it probably needs to do is respect the shuffle setting whenever the "googlemusic playlist play" command is issued and the add a list of randomly selected tracks instead of the current behavior of just adding all tracks. This should be somewhat straightforward given that the plugin seems to already do this from the web interface but I don't know the specifics.

There's nothing I can do here from the iPeng side (other than create a better icon which I will do now...)

Other than that the plugin works quite well, I like it. Should somehow be more easily installable."

hechtus commented 9 years ago

Regarding Library "Shuffle All" ... Google normally adds all tracks from the library to the playlist (mobile client, web interface). This is not feasable, as the number of tracks in a squeezebox playlist is somehow limited (500). I would suggest to randomly select (500) tracks from the library and add them to the current playlist.

It is possible to modify the maximum number of tracks in a playlist: Settings->Advanced->Performance->Maximum Playlist Length. It it's set to something >=100 I think the suggested solution is feasible.

hechtus commented 9 years ago

Regarding iPeng ... I don't get the point. What is not working anymore? I don't have iPeng to test this out. Is there an Android-iPeng out there for testing?

mspertus commented 9 years ago

Thanks Hechtus How do I randomly select 500 tracks from the library as you suggested?

Regarding iPeng, I will ask Pippin for more information.

coolio107 commented 9 years ago

Umm, I don't see any problems with iPeng and the radios. My comment above was somewhat speculative regarding the question why SqueezeCommander doesn't work. Because I have some insight into how SqueezeCommander works I gave a possible reason and mentioned that if this is the cause (lack of play commands) then other Apps like iPeng or OrangeSqueeze might run into issues, too. I've now re-subscribed to Google music and the radios work fine at least with iPeng 8 (didn't try old versions), at least to the degree the plugin works stable (seeing a lot of premature skips).

coolio107 commented 9 years ago

OK, now I got it. Here's the issue, it's not really iPeng specific but it does have some iPeng specific aspects...: To play the song list in random mode on a device (Touch, Radio, Controller, probably most iOS and Android Apps, definitely Logitech's) you need to use the context menu un the "Songs" list. Playing from that context menu is what is broken (not just in iPeng, everywhere) in that it always only plays from the first 500 tracks in the list.

For iPeng, it would also make sense to mark this list as a playlist (or album). What this means is it should look like the track listing for an album in the library does and the "Songs" menu item should be tagged as an album or (better) playlist. This way, iPeng would show a different menu type from which you can more easily add tracks to the current playlist. Changing this tagging would also probably fix the first issue (the shuffled playback issue) since I assume the "play" action on the "Songs" menu would work correctly - that's why the web interface works. This would, though, not fix it for all controller Apps.

If you want to reproduce all this on Android, SqueezeCommander would be a good choice, it usually behaves the same way as iPeng.