Shaken, not stirred Quick Start

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This page is copied from the program's help file, except links to other help topics are omitted here.

Jukebox Shuffle Quick Start

This assumes you have assigned ratings (1 to 5 stars) to your songs in Windows Media Player. If you haven't rated your songs you'll need to do that first; see Windows Media Player Requirements.

This is just a "quick start" procedure, and later you may decide to adjust it for your preferences.

1. Start Shaken, not stirred. In the Jukebox Custom Shuffle tab of its main window, click the "Add song group or playlist" button near the top.
   
    
2. That will open the "Add songs to shuffle" window, where you can just click OK to accept the default: All songs in the Windows Media Player library, with songs played more often the higher their rating (number of stars) is.
   Or before clicking OK, you could increase or decrease how much more often higher rated songs play, by changing the counts in the bottom half of the window.
   
    
3. Back in the main window, your selection of all songs is now added to the list of songs to be shuffled. You can leave the default settings unchanged ("Distribution of repetitions ..." and "Output Playlist File" sections).
   
   Click the "Save as Shuffled Playlist" button at the bottom of the window.
    
4. You will then see a standard "Save As" dialog to name the shuffled playlist. Name the file whatever you like.
5. After you click OK in the Save As dialog, the shuffle will start and should take a few seconds to finish.

After you create the shuffled playlist:

1. In Windows Media Player (or other synchronization program) include the new shuffled playlist in the sync to have it copied to your MP3 player.
   Directly copying this or any other playlist file from your computer to your MP3 player usually won't work; you need a sync program to convert the playlist for the player's format and folders.
2. When you play the playlist in your MP3 player, make sure the player does not reshuffle the playlist (unless you selected the non-default option to truncate the output playlist to no repetitions); that ordinary shuffle would undo the separation of repeated songs that's been done in this playlist.

Beyond Quick Start - More Fine Tuned Distributions

The example shown above might do all you want. Or depending on your tastes, you might like a distribution more particular than just playing higher rated songs more often.

To illustrate the possibilities, consider an example where there are some songs you want to hear more often than others with the same rating. Lets say you want to songs recently added to your collection to be played more often than the rating based frequency. And also suppose that there are a few of your favorite songs you want to play even more often than the other 5-star songs.

You can accomplish this by putting multiple selections in the list of song groups to include in the shuffle. For the songs you want to play even more often than the 5-star rate, you would need to first make a playlist of those songs. (See Windows Media Player's help for how to create a playlist.)

Right after Step 2 in the Quick Start example above, with All Songs already added to the selection, you would click the "Add song group or playlist" button again. In the Add Songs window (see illustration in Step 2 above), select the "Songs added to the library in last 45 days" option and adjust the 45 day limit to whatever you want. Choose the frequency you want the new songs to play (which will be in addition to how often they already play as part of the first All Songs selection) and click OK. Then repeat the Add Songs process again, except this time choose the Playlist option and select from the list of playlists.

This results in a song selection like above.

The frequencies of play for the New Songs may look strange, with 1-star songs set to play the most often; but keep in mind that this frequency of play is added to what it already would be as part of the ALL SONGS selection. The frequencies here were chosen to play new songs rated 1 to 3 stars just as often as old songs rated 4 stars, i.e. a total of 7 repetitions per cycle adding All Songs and New Songs repetitions. New songs rated 4 stars are played as often as 5-star old songs. This example assumes 5-star songs are already played enough for the user's taste, so no need to play new 5-star songs even more often.

The songs in the "... hear every week" playlist are presumably all rated 5-stars, so there was no point in having the frequency of play vary by rating. With 10 repetitions per cycle added to the 12 they already have in the All Songs selection as 5-star songs, these play almost twice as often as the other 5-star songs.

More details on customizing your shuffled playlists are in the Jukebox Shuffle Main Window and Add Songs topics.