[ctviggen]

I've unchecked the boxes for Christmas and Holiday so that Squeezer Server wouldn't put these types of songs into random play.

In the last few hours, Squeeze Server has selected three (or four?) Christmas songs for random play.  Each of the songs has the word "Christmas" somewhere in the title of the album or the song.  So, what do these boxes do, if anything?  I could understand if the song was "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and the album title was unrelated to Christmas, but these tracks have the word "Christmas" in them!

This is one of those things where I have to ask myself what Logitech is doing.  What good is providing options such as check boxes that don't work?  It's simply idiotic. 

Another problem I have is that Squeeze Server loves The Police for some reason.  I have 4 CDs of The Police, which puts them at less than 1 percent of my CDs.  Yet, I was listening to random album play yesterday, when the SS selected a The Police album and an album with Christmas in the title.  So, I removed the check boxes from Christmas and Holiday, and this caused a reset to the random play, whereupon SS selected not one but two additional The Police albums to play.  Because of this, I decided to switch to random songs.  Whereupon, the SS again selected several tunes from The Police. 

I realize that patterns occur in random data, but this is absurd.  Anyone else have similar oddities with random play in Squeeze Server?

[funkmonkey]

For SqueezeServer to recognize music as "christmas" or "holiday" I believe that you need to tag it as such...  most likely when you ripped the files there was an option to set the genere.  I would guess that either nothing was selected when you made the rips or that some thing other than "holiday, or Christmas was selected.  I don't believe that it pays any attention to the titles.

I am unhappy with the random selections as well, but started using "dynamic playlist" and "track-stat" third party plug-ins, and have not heard a repeat since.  You can select "not played songs" as the playlist and it will randomly select songs that have never been played.  Other options are also available, like least played, most played, not played in a while...

Hope that helps.

[Bob in St. Louis]

I agree with Mr. Monkey.
Sounds like you've got a tagging issue. Check the tag info of the songs that it played. make sure it's "Christmas". Even a misspelling of the word Christmas would be ignored as another genre. To the best of my knowledge, it's not going to care if the word "Christmas" is in the title, only what the genre tag is.

Bob

[sts9fan]

I do find that squeezeserver can get stuck in folders.  I have my reggae in a separate folder and once it goes in it may never get out.

[bprice2]

It has nothing to do with the title of the album or track.  The options you see when choosing what to include in random play are the "genre" tags on your album files.  Just retag all your christmas stuff as such and you should be fine. 

[mca]

started using "dynamic playlist" and "track-stat" third party plug-ins, and have not heard a repeat since.

Where can we find these plugins?

[Wayne1]

Plugins WIKI

Here is a place to start looking into different plugins

[JEaton]

One thing about genres and random play... If you tag a track with multiple genres, which is easily done, only one of the genres needs to be including in the random play list to be played.  Tagging multiple genres is done by adding either multiple fields in Flac or Ogg, or else by using a separator character in any tagging system. For instance:

GENRE=Jazz;Vocal

GENRE=Rock;Christmas

This has its advantages, but if you were to play random mode with only Rock selected, it will play tracks tagged both Rock and Christmas.