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Shaken, not stirred |
Download Version 2.1 updated 8/10/08 Quick Start Instructions F. A. Q. Copy Album Art to Player Contact Author |
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Shaken, not stirred |
Download Version 2.1 updated 8/10/08 Quick Start Instructions F. A. Q. Copy Album Art to Player Contact Author |
Shaken, not stirred is a jukebox program for generating shuffled playlists, with two distinctions from an ordinary shuffle: songs you like more are played more often (based on the 1 to 5 stars rating you assign in Windows Media Player), and repetitions of the same song are prevented from occurring too close together. How much more often favored songs are played, and how repetitions are separated, are options controlled by the user.
It also includes a separate utility to copy album art from your computer to your MP3 player, described on its own page.
The program uses Windows Media Player's database to know what songs are in your collection, and what their ratings are for setting how often to play each song.
If you use Windows Media Player to sync your MP3 Player, and have assigned song ratings (1 to 5 stars),
no preparation is needed and you can generate shuffled playlists with Shaken
Not Stirred a few minutes after you download it. If you don't use Windows
Media Player, some extra steps are required, described in the F.A.Q. and more
fully in the program's Help.
For a simple example of what it's like to use this program, see the Quick Start Instructions, copied from the program's help file.
The selection example in the illustration to the right shows some of the program's capabilities. The shuffled playlist will include all the songs in the users collection, with songs rated 5-stars played twelve times as often as 1-star songs. The songs in the second and third song groups included in the shuffle are already included as part of ALL SONGS, so their play frequency in those groups is in addition to how often they would be played based on their song ratings in ALL SONGS. The user wants to play New Songs that he/she recently added to their collection more often than old songs with the same rating. They also have a playlist of their favorite songs, presumably all rated 5 stars, that they want to hear almost twice as often as the other 5-star songs.
The playlist generated by this selection includes a lot of songs repeated multiple times. If you ran an ordinary shuffle on such a playlist, those songs would of course play more often. Unfortunately, normal random coincidences would sometimes put most or all the occurrences of a repeated song close together, even playing the same song twice in a row, with other long stretches of the playlist where you never hear the song. The "Distribution of repetitions" options shown in the illustration are provided to prevent that problem. The default option, selected in the illustration, distributes repetitions in approximately equal intervals with some random variation.
Windows XP or later (Does not require the .NET framework)
Windows Media Player version 10 or later
Probably OK with Windows 2000 and Windows Media Player 9, not tested. Windows 2000 may need gdiplus.dll
from Microsoft.
Shaker.zip 375 KB Version 2.1
Download and use entirely at your own risk. No warranty of any kind.
Freeware. Copyright © 2008 Matthew Ahmed. All rights reserved.
If anyone really wants the old version (not recommended), here it is: shaker_old_version_1.11.zip
Installation: Unzip the download file into an empty folder (e.g. C:\Program Files\Shaker) and run Shaker.exe
Note for Windows Vista users: Depending on your User Access Control settings, you may get the notorious "Are you sure you want to do this?" warnings when this program writes temporary files in its own folder, if it's a subfolder of Program Files. You might avoid this by putting the Shaken Not Stirred folder somewhere else, not in Program Files, e.g. C:\Shaker; this is just speculation because I haven't tested with Windows Vista (and don't intend to try Vista).
Uninstall: Just delete the program folder containing Shaker.exe. The program stores all configuration info in its own folder, and does not write any entries in the Windows Registry.
Version 2.1 released 8/10/2008
Jukebox Shuffle: Added option to truncate output playlist to whatever size has
no repetitions of same song. Cosmetic interface tweaks.
Version 2.0 released 5/26/2008
Jukebox Shuffle: No longer needs user created playlist with songs already
repeated. Uses Windows Media Player's database to generate more repetitions of songs with higher
ratings, and to generate selection of songs newer than user specified maximum age.
Version 1.11
Bug fix, Playlist Shuffle: Typed minimum separation in "More truly random" option didn't update associated spin control's record of the
current setting.
Version 1.1 released 4/24/2007
Playlist Shuffle, Bug fix: Occasional crashes shuffling lists with few or no
songs included only once.
Album Art Copy, New feature: Option to hide rows normally not selected for copy.