Burning a CD of Random Songs from Media Player

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alasta

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#19253 11-Feb-2008 11:42

This morning I wanted to quickly burn a CD with a random selection of songs from my music library in Windows Media Player and I am astounded at how complicated this simple task turned out to be.

At first I figured that the best way to go about it would be to create an auto playlist but whilst I can limit the number or duration of songs on the playlist I can't request for them to be selected at random - they appear to always be selected in order of the artist's name. The only other approach that I could try is to drag my entire music library into the 'burn list' pane, select 'shuffle list now' and then delete about 1380 songs so that I was left with only enough to fill one CD. This works but is extremely slow despite my music library being relatively small.

Surely there is an easier way to do this? Can anyone give me simple step by step instructions on how to go about it, or should I give up and install some other piece of software to do it?

davidcole

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#109850 11-Feb-2008 13:15

Welcome to my Pain.

I like listening to such playlists - a random selection limited by time. Winamp used to have a plugin to do it (called quick tunes). I've never found anything else to do it.....but you might also try MediaMonkey which I've heard people like.

I ended up writing my own music player that had this functionality (originally a plugin for GBPVR). But it wouldn't do what you want, and it's not finished....

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dnb4life

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#109873 11-Feb-2008 15:03

i dunno how much of a market there is out there for people wanting to make a random selection to put on a cd, usually people put specific music on cd, u could put your library on random and then you could use the songs it picks randomly as your selection? why not just close your eyes and throw darts at your playlist?!

(i in no way take responsibility for monitors that stop working due to dart holes

)

alasta

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#109946 11-Feb-2008 18:05

dnb4life: i dunno how much of a market there is out there for people wanting to make a random selection to put on a cd, usually people put specific music on cd,

I would have thought that it would be something that people would do often. I want a random selection of songs to play in the car while I'm driving to Nelson tomorrow, and I would have thought that if putting a random selection of songs onto a portable device/memory card is a commonly used feature then the same thing should be available for CD burning.

u could put your library on random and then you could use the songs it picks randomly as your selection?

But as far as I'm aware the only way to do that would be to put the playback mode on random and drag each song across one by one as playback of that song commences. That's hardly easy or convenient.

why not just close your eyes and throw darts at your playlist?!

Ha! That sounds like it would be just as easy as the alternatives! I'm actually wondering if I should just give up on WMP and install iTunes. I know that advanced users have some complaints about iTunes but at least in iTunes simple stuff is actually simple and that's all I care about. It seems to me that you can't do anything in WMP without having an intimate knowledge of how it works.

dnb4life

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#109957 11-Feb-2008 18:32

alasta: I'm actually wondering if I should just give up on WMP and install iTunes. I know that advanced users have some complaints about iTunes but at least in iTunes simple stuff is actually simple and that's all I care about. It seems to me that you can't do anything in WMP without having an intimate knowledge of how it works.

i would suggest winamp. i use it myself for music and a lot of other advanced users i know use winamp as it has a lot of plugins for all sorts of things. i used to own an ipod years ago and deleted itunes after using it for about 2 weeks. if you have an ipod then just download the ipod plugin for winamp and then you can just drag and drop media to your ipod. as you said itunes is not recommended by advanced users, from personal experience i've found it has a lack of features, ofter buggy and prone to crashes and ofcourse its designed by mac and i have a pc so its not really my style. personally i usually steer well clear of wmp unless i'm using media centre too. music = winamp, video = vlc media player

alasta: I would have thought that if putting a random selection of songs onto a portable device/memory card is a commonly used feature then the same thing should be available for CD burning.

the problem with CDs is they're not a reusable resource unless ofcourse you buy rewritables but from what i have seen (due to price mainly) rewritables aren't very popular, CDs also have the fundamental flaw of being degradable i.e scratching and disk-rot.
portable media players on the other hand aren't exposed to the elements as they have casing, you can also change playlists and load and unload music whenever you want too.

i would be tempted to suggest you get a simple 1gb player and if you have a cassette deck in your car then get a adaptop so you can plug in a media player or alternatively get a media player adaptop to send the signal to your car radio. that way you have something that you can randomise the music on whenever you want and you could probably pick up a 1gb player for about $25 these days.

alasta

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#109962 11-Feb-2008 19:00

dnb4life: i would suggest winamp. i use it myself for music and a lot of other advanced users i know use winamp as it has a lot of plugins for all sorts of things.

Thanks, I'll give that a go when I get around to it.

i would be tempted to suggest you get a simple 1gb player and if you have a cassette deck in your car then get a adaptop so you can plug in a media player or alternatively get a media player adaptop to send the signal to your car radio. that way you have something that you can randomise the music on whenever you want and you could probably pick up a 1gb player for about $25 these days.

Yeah, I hear what you're saying but this is just a one-off trip in a rental car so it's not something I'll be doing often. Usually when I travel around the North Island I can get radio reception for most of the journey but when travelling in the South Island I find that the radio dies between Cheviot and just south of Blenheim so I just wanted a couple of CDs to fill in that gap.

I actually already own an iPod Nano and a cheaper Transcend T.Sonic music player (which is awful, by the way) but I hardly ever use either of them as I prefer to listen to news and interviews on my $35 AM/FM walkwan when I'm travelling to and from work. I have no problem sticking with stone age technology if it happens to suit the purpose!

paradoxsm

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#109968 11-Feb-2008 19:29

Media Player sucks big time.

Nothing like good old sorted directories of the ripped CD's (I'm assuming you rip your CD's and not download illegally we hope ;-)). I made a simple app to create m3u playlists in the root folder for specific for genre, group year etc and it works fantastically and is portable to ANY media player now and in the future. (like my Rockbox iPod)

Actually, on that note, I'm gonna pull WMP and "movie maker" from my system right this minute and make dinner.