[jjd-uk]

Basically your use case, 4000 songs in an album is not a good idea. There are better and much nicer ways to do this.

Nodes or Smart playlists is the answer here.

Nope not always.

While I never queue as many as 4000 at once, I do frequently queue several hundred at a time, let's say I'm in a 80's mode so I'll add all my 80's singles to the queue and have playback on random. The advantage of doing it this way is that it ensures no repeats, that's why I almost never use Party Mode as while music is added randomly to the playlist in Party Mode, as previously played songs are not remembered I would frequently gets repeats which I don't want.

[docwra]

Basically your use case, 4000 songs in an album is not a good idea. There are better and much nicer ways to do this.

Nodes or Smart playlists is the answer here.

Nope not always.

While I never queue as many as 4000 at once, I do frequently queue several hundred at a time, let's say I'm in a 80's mode so I'll add all my 80's singles to the queue and have playback on random. The advantage of doing it this way is that it ensures no repeats, that's why I almost never use Party Mode as while music is added randomly to the playlist in Party Mode, as previously played songs are not remembered I would frequently gets repeats which I don't want.

Yeh I imagine 4,000 on any list is going to grind to a halt with the thumbnail parser working away.

Personally I keep normal albums, and use a node to sort by decade and then genre. That lets me queue up pretty much what I want.

[DaveBlake]

@zag there are some users that don't want the ability to select a short targeted list of music based on criteria in the way the library can, nor do they want file view. They want a "Winamp" style facility to quickly list all their music in one huge list and then browse page by page.

While Kodi can show songs like this e.g. songs node, it is slow to load. It fundamentally was not designed for that kind of use on a large music collection. The large collection itself is not an issue, the db can cope well, but viewing it as long lists is a known issue.

Just another thought @heula, using Kodi via a remote app like Kore or Yatse might give you want you want. They create their own copy of the Kodi db, and might then be more efficient at displaying the items in a Winamp like way. Not sure they offer song level support though.

[DaveBlake]

While I never queue as many as 4000 at once, I do frequently queue several hundred at a time, let's say I'm in a 80's mode so I'll add all my 80's singles to the queue and have playback on random. The advantage of doing it this way is that it ensures no repeats, that's why I almost never use Party Mode as while music is added randomly to the playlist in Party Mode, as previously played songs are not remembered I would frequently gets repeats which I don't want.

From what I can see Party Mode does avoid repeats, or are you saying between restarts?

[jjd-uk]

Nope in a 2 to 3 hours period with something like 700 songs to choose from I'd get songs repeating 3 or 4 times while the vast majority hadn't even played once. It's been a while since I used it however as I found it useless for my needs, but I'm pretty sure I have taken it for another test run since paxxi did the random seed change.

[tkgafs]

the party mode is better in v17 but still doesn't seem to be as random as it should be. its the old how random is random question.

I pretty much use party mode on a continuous basis, simply turning off the sound system when I don't want to listen to music, I have a collection of about 20000 tracks and one thing I do see a lot of, is that in the playlist which shows the 10 queued tracks, often there will be 2 or 3 songs by the same artist. Whilst this is quite possible and completely random, it happens often enough that it does make you wonder how the random algorithm actually works. I must go and look at the play count since I installed v17 and see if some tracks do seem to get favoured more than others.

I would create playlists or as jjd-uk does select a few hundred tracks then play these randomly if the system showed the correct artwork for the currently playing track rather than the currently in focus track, i have never understood this behaviour and having in the past raised a feature request to have it corrected but got shouted down by people saying that it wasn't a bug it was by design as they would want kodi to only show the artwork of the item in focus, I only surmised they never actually listened to music and gave up discussing it.

[markusA]

Having experienced some odd behaviors myself in the past, I can attest to the hidden issues not always being obvious. In my case Dave managed to help me figure it out...
In many cases I wonder if a comprehensive user manual wouldn't do the trick? The code itself seems to have gotten significantly improved in the latest versions and much have been fixed.
Kodi is found on many platforms and sometimes there are platform specific issues.
I've tried looking into smart playlists in the past but somewhere on the way I always lost interest, it could be that I wasn't getting it or that it seemed overly complicated, can't recall exactly what it was atm.
Anyhoo, my message is that it's quite common for the tech improving at a much higher pace than the user guides and it tends to cause some friction between end users and developers. Unfortunately, writing user guides is about as much fun as watching paint dry.

[DaveBlake]

Anyhoo, my message is that it's quite common for the tech improving at a much higher pace than the user guides and it tends to cause some friction between end users and developers. Unfortunately, writing user guides is about as much fun as watching paint dry.

Tech improving slowly but still at a much higher pace than the user guides...

I like to believe that, although I don't enjoy it, technical authors enjoy writing user guides, and one day someone will want to do that for Kodi.

Meanwhile "Music Corner" is a generally friendly place, and that friction keeps to a minimum. I will add that if you come with an issue and I reply with a user work around it does not mean I have ignored the problem, it just means while there is more work to do than resources I believe the users would rather have a way to keep going.