weighted random giving problem

[cardiacanesthesia]

two problems
1.
i made a few custom weighted random criterion for listening to a particular type of tracks
they are shown in the play order>weighted random menu, but selecting one of them doesn't change the auto fill pattern
even if i go to custom , select the particular criteria and press apply followed by ok, it doesn't change the queue behaviour
however, going to custom in the above menu and modifying the criteria slightly starts working

2. i made a weighted random criteria to listen to 4 star songs from pop. it works beautifully. now i added another condition to choose genre rock . both given equal weightage. what i expected was that it will play songs 4 star from either pop or rock but now it keeps listing from all sorts of genre along with the above two.i have read the FAQ but iam not sure how to achieve that

3. not the proper thread to ask but in 1.1.6 i am not able to find the menu to create new custom labels

thanks
dr subodh

[Quentin Sculo]

1) everything seems to work for me, see 2.
2) it is possible that it is a misunderstanding of how the random modes work, sadly it is far from clear and there is not many explanations (there is one at the end of this page http://gmusicbrowser.org/guide.html).
Random modes do not generally filter the playlist, every song in the playlist still has a chance to be picked, except for the songs which weight is exactly 0.
And currently, while you can add rules that will result in weight=0 for songs which don't have 4 stars and are not pop, you can't do that for songs that are (not rock or not pop), only (not rock and not pop).
The random mode system is very old, I plan to improve it, in particular by making it possible to choose a filter instead of just genre=one_genre, which would allow what you want I think.
Though if what you want is simply a playlist made of songs of 4 stars with a genre of rock or pop, a filter is what you should use (with either a shuffle order, or a random mode with no rules=not weighted). Note that the filter editor in 1.1.6 (and git) is still a bit broken and can't deal with some type of filters, I'm working on it.
Suggestions for making the random modes clearer are welcome btw.

3) you don't need to create it, you can add it directly in a "song properties" dialog. The widget to add it may bot be very intuitive, just type the name, and press enter.
I will probably add an "other" option in the songs context menu -> "edit labels", that pops up a dialog where you can type a new label name.

[cardiacanesthesia]

i had presumed that weighted random selects files from the whole library and not from the filtered lists.

You were right, what i needed was a playlist filter and then apply weighted list to it
i was doing it after clearing all the filters so any song whole library had a probability to be selected (except those weighted 0)
so if i created a filter with genre rock or pop and then applied weighted random to select "least recently played 4 star songs"
it seems to work fine.


this is the best thing about Linux that ppl are always ready to help out other. In my view GMB is the best music player for linux. and should be the default for Ubuntu. will vote for any poll on internet.

will keep bothering with problems in future
thanks for support
dr subodh