[robrocke]

I have a question about using shuffle play with Kodi: I want to avoid the exact same random/shuffle sort order every time.

I am running Kodi 16.1 on a Mac Mini running Mac OS 10.10.5 ("Yosemite").

My music collection lives on a NAS device in a “My Music” folder that’s organized at the top-level into a few general genre categories such as “ROCK, “CLASSICAL,” and “JAZZ.” Within those genre categories my collection is then organized at the Artist level within which are individual Album sub-folders.

I’ve scanned that entire “My Music” archive into the Kodi Music Library.

When I want to do extended casual listening, I’d like to shuffle play the contents of say the entire “ROCK: folder and have a unique, randomized playback order.

However when I try to do that now by going into Kodi’s Music – Files menu and then choosing to play that “ROCK” folder, I get the same sort order every time.

Is there any way to re-generate that shuffle/sort order anew?

(Note: I currently have a separate issue where trying to toggle the music playback shuffle option off/on is crashing Kodi—both within the application GUI and using the iOS Kodi Remote -- which I’ve entered as a separate support post.)

[zag]

Are you using the file mode to play them or are you using the library mode?

It certainly should work in library mode. Just go to the genre node.

[scott967]

My suggestion: scan your music into the Kodi music library.
Create "smart playlists" for songs or songs + music videos (mixed) to define the filters you want.
Select and play a smart playlist in "party mode" to get a random playback. Musicplaylist window will show the current and next 9 songs queued.

scott s.
.

[robrocke]

Hey everyone
Thanks for the responses.
So yes I actually do typically use the “Files” playback method.
I probably shouldn’t have used the loaded term “Genre” in my original description of my NAS organization.
I simply use a top level folder structure with some big general categories like “Rock,” “Classical,” “Jazz,” etc.
But that doesn’t match the actual “genre” metadata tags for the individual Artists-Albums-Songs within those top-level folders. I don’t micro-manage those actual “genre” tags much and always just sort of let that auto-populate when I ripped my CD collection to FLAC over many years.
So I’m sure within my top-level “ROCK” folder (what I called “genre” but probably shouldn’t have) there are albums tagged with the myriad relevant “genre” metadata variations such as “classic rock,” “pop rock,” “alternative rock,” “progressive rock,“ etc.
That’s why Kodi’s Genre based playback has never worked for me.
Playing back the whole “Rock” folder works via Files playback, but when I toggle it to shuffle play the playback order is always the same.
Scott, you mentioned using a Smart Playlist. I have been writing up another support forum posting about that because that doesn’t seem to work as expected either. I don’t seem to be able to create a working Smart Playlist based on file/path location on my NAS. It looks to be successfully restricted to, say, the path to the “ROCK” folder, but then when I try to play it back in Party Mode it plays back songs from my entire Kodi Library, which includes all the music from all of those top-level NAS folders (“Rock,” “Classical,” “Jazz,” etc.)?
Thanks!

[robrocke]

Hi folks. Sorry to be a pest. Just checking back in to see if anyone has any more ideas? Other people must have this same request: to create a unique shuffle play sort order every time? Thanks!

[scott967]

Scott, you mentioned using a Smart Playlist. I have been writing up another support forum posting about that because that doesn’t seem to work as expected either. I don’t seem to be able to create a working Smart Playlist based on file/path location on my NAS. It looks to be successfully restricted to, say, the path to the “ROCK” folder, but then when I try to play it back in Party Mode it plays back songs from my entire Kodi Library, which includes all the music from all of those top-level NAS folders (“Rock,” “Classical,” “Jazz,” etc.)?
Thanks!

Can't duplicate that here. Might help if you could tun on debug logging mode and upload a debug log captured when you try to play a smart playlist in party mode to xbmclogs. In your case is eg. "Rock" defined as a source folder? That might make a difference (I use a main "music" folder that is a single source folder for all music).

scott s.
.