[jmarshall]

you use the playlist field to combine playlists.

eg you have a playlist that gets all the music from 1983, 1987 and 1989.

what if you wanted to just listen to disco from those years?

then doing:

<smartplaylist>
<name>disco from the 80s</name>
<match>all</match>
<rule field="playlist" operator="is">1983_1987_1989</rule>
<rule field="genre" operator="is">disco</rule>
</smartplaylist>

where:

<smartplaylist>
<name>1983_1987_1989</name>
<match>one</match>
<rule field="year" operator="is">1983</rule>
<rule field="year" operator="is">1987</rule>
<rule field="year" operator="is">1989</rule>
</smartplaylist>

would do it.

note that you are combining some or operations (the match one in the year based playlist) with an and operation (the match all in the first playlist).

cvs is still down, so i'll post back when it's back up and running.

cheers,
jonathan

[incognegro]

:o wow..........never thought of it that way, hey thats a great idea..... cant wait to try that out, probably come up with some better ideas for lists.

[t029248]

: probably come up with some better ideas for lists.

he post them here or place them in the smart playlist section of the xbmc manual!

[jmarshall]

just an update. developer cvs access is back online, so all the stuff above is in cvs now.

i believe anonymous cvs won't be synced up for a few days yet.

if you don't have the changes in the changelog.txt dated 04-04-2006 then you don't yet have the multiple playlist functionality.

cheers,
jonathan

[whodini]

what format should the field="time" value be in? i tried "1:00:00" but didn't seem to work.

thanks

james

[jmarshall]

1:00:00 is one hour.

4:51 is 4 minutes 51 seconds.

[nsmoller]

do these work for videos?

[jmarshall]

no

[thugg]

i'm having some oddities when using the random order tag, here's my code

<smartplaylist>
<name>stoopid</name>
<match>all</match>
<rule field="artist" operator="is">slightly stoopid</rule>
<rule field="album" operator="isnot">slightly stoopid</rule>
<limit>50</limit>
<order>random</order>
</smartplaylist>

it seems to work fine, but when it loads the songs in a 'random' order, it's only going through the list of albums, picking the first song from some of the albums, then moves on and picks several second songs, then third and so on. now, i guess this is technically a random order, but it's not really. i have some screen shots but i don't have my xbox on me, but here is an example of what this play list looks like.

01. intro (album1)
01. castles of sand (album2)
01. thinkin' bout cops (album3)
02. free win (album3)
02. officer (album4)
03. somebody (album1)
03. questionable (album4)
03. train (album3)
03. ese loco (album2)
04. xx
04. xxx
05. xxx

and so on. i'm just wondering if this is how it's supposed to pick them in random, or if it's just kind of fucked up?

[jmarshall]

you have it sorted by track number.

change the sort by: button in the gui to sort by: playlist.

[thugg]

thanks, that does seem to help with the randomization, however, it still occasionally seems to group them all by album (while sorted by playlist that is), though at least not by track number as well. oops, i guess it's probably doing that 'cause i guess i changed the sort order to descending by playcount, so that's prob what it is.

[vambo]

jonathan,

firstly, excellent feature.

i dont want to be accused of "its never enough" but could i ask a question on the feasability of introducing (like winamp) the 'amount of change' between one track to the next.

i'm assuming this is based on the id3 bpm tag.

the reason is because at the moment party mode selection can swing wildly from anytrack to anytrack.
ie. prodigy 'firestarter' to my sons nursery rhymes and back to anything else.

restricting to a genre does help eliminate this, but with a large genere such as 'rock' the large bpm swing still exists.

just an idea and i realise theres a feature freeze imminent, but was wondering if its doable ?

cheers

just wondered how this was going - i to liked BBB sugestion as there is the swing thing even when using genre. I also noticed theres a "Mood" tag in V2 tags which might also do the same job. You could have a laid back mood for sunday mornings and a rocking mood for friday nights. Genre wouldn't matter, and you'd only have to mood tag your fav songs. I guess this would also need a DB change. I did mess around with an HTPC (which i binned as an Xbox with XBMC is so much better in the living room) this did however have a definable D/B template to customise what was scanned into the D/B but i guess that even if this could be used it's well beyond where we are with feature freeze

[evilhomeruk]

jmarshall, you are a star, thanks for this.

Can you reveal or point me to where I could find information about valid value for the 'inthelast' and 'notinthelast' functions?

In the wiki example you demonstrate inthelast 2 weeks and in this thread you've said months is also valid. Are there a set of universal keywords like day/week/month/year that can be used on all date fields?

For information, I'm involved in testing a XBMC python Smart Playlist Editor script which would write the playlists to the users playlists folder. Is this useful or is it going to superceeded by a native XMBC feature?

[kraqh3d]

looking at the code, it supports "weeks" and "months", anything else is assumed to be days. everything is translated into days. 7 days to a week, and 31 days to a month. (and it only supports one word so you cant do "2 months 2 weeks". that would just be interpreted as 2 months.)

[jmarshall]

As for "will it be superseded by a native feature" - possibly, but not likely for a while yet (ie months). The python version can always been seen as a proof of concept - afterall, the GUI for it is not trivial.

Cheers,
Jonathan