LongPlayer

advanced playlist randomization

LongPlayer is a program that automatically fills your good ol' WinAmp playlist with music from dynamically created playlists. It tries to avoid you hearing the same songs over and over again, based on the last time a song was played and your song ratings.

Staff review

This is a great idea for a plugin. Just point it to the directory where your mp3 files are stored, and it will randomly load tracks from the entire directory. You can choose which file types for it to work with, mp3, m3u, etc. Also allows for you to save certain combinations of directories; so, for instance if you wanted it to randomize only from your mellow music, you just add the albums you want containing mellow music, and save that as a playlist. Very functional. You can configure it to work with a song rating system as well (chooses songs based on individual rating). Extremely nice for those who are in to the random play style of listening.

Comments

(Why do I need to provide a title?) - Why oh why do people feel the need to rewrite file browsers badly? [Stop reading if you don\'t want to read a miny rant] Really, this is just a little gripe, but if you haven\'t organized your files yet, you\'ll have to do it from explorer. The dialogs are made to look like normal \'open file\' dialogs, but they\'re not: unintuitive details view (columns are not visible or accessible with the default size of the dialog); no ability to right click/move/open with; nonstandard icons/colours which look very out of place on a most colour schemes (although not the default). [Okay, for real, stop reading...] My impression is that the app was developed using wxWindows. Okay, a fine gui framework. But this is a win32 only application. Gains nothing from cross platform-ness. By all means, use whatever framework makes things easier. But as soon as there is a standard way of doing something on the one platform you support, you should use that, even if you can\'t from the framework you\'re using. Nothing worse for a user than gratuitiously reimplementing standard functionality. This isn\'t a knock against skins by the way: even winamp itself uses the standard dialogs for adding/saving files. It Just Makes Sense. If you\'re going to reimplement standard dialogs, you have to do a damn good job, or it\'ll stick out like a sore thumb. Mozilla (firefox) can get away with this (and yet they still use the standard win32 dialog if I\'m not mistaken). Sun (java) has tried many times, and they have yet to do a good job of it. [resume reading if you want...] There are enough little things that went wrong setting it up that I probably won\'t be using it :( - December 20, 2005 by c u

Loong Play - I've been looking for something to automatically generate playlists for my shoutcast station. It will take an initial investment of your time to create your "master" playlists at first, unless you already have them created. This program will monitor the last time you played a particular track and insert tracks from your current winamp playlist based on your previous ranking and genre selection that you've done along the way. A tremendous amount of customization makes this plug-in the right choice if you're looking for reliable randomization into your playlist. The genre marking is a little difficult to understand at first. See the color graph in the image? You rate your genres by color/mood. So, if you wanted to mark all your dance(able) songs under the far left red color, you could constrain this plugin to only insert similar matching songs based only upon that color/genre/theme/mood. - September 8, 2005 by Curtis Kline

Just what I needed for a massive playlist - WA kept crashing cause I had too many songs in the media library. This works perfectly selecting the songs randomly and letting me choose the randomization by a number of factors. Only complaint, make it part of the WA interface and not a separate application. But hey, it's free! - August 10, 2005 by Frank Johnson

Next version should be perfect!! - D/loaded & installed okay. I spent some time going through my 1600 songs, telling Longplayer which songs and directories are my favourites. They are graded from 0 to 10, so now, i hear my favourites more often. There are controls to fine tune how Longplayer handles the level importance. On the downside - it has problems reading some ID tags, and crashes quite often when manually forwarding through the playlist, but i have removed these ID tags, and its all okay now. Also, there are some functions i dont understand, so a help file would be useful. And it would be nice if it could create a playlist bigger than 99 songs, which i could then save as m3u. Look forward to the next release. Thanks Andrew - December 29, 2003 by brian boyle

Perfect. - I have over 10,000 MP3s I like to shuffle... but that doesn't really happen in WinAmp, does it? This beats the heck out of all the other randomizer/shufflers out there. Thanks! - February 19, 2003 by Johnny Million

Nice, very nice. - I just run a small Shoutcast server and this helps me properly randomize what I play..nuff said, mission acomplished. Nice one :D - December 11, 2002 by Peter Vine

Just what I've been wanting! - This does just what I've been looking for when I don't want to assemble a play list. I'll give it some directories to go to and walk away. Beautiful! I love this thing! It's like saying, "I'm in this mood, talk to me". I did have to download it twice to get it to install. - October 27, 2002 by Mike Rura

It doesn't work - downloaded it, downloaded it again, and it still doesn't work - September 7, 2002 by Robby Pace

Got Shoutcast? - I unleashed this baby on my archive, over 72 hours of playlist so far! Pros = Will not create stupidly long playlists, it updates with a few more tracks when it get near the end of a list. Damn easy to use. Some features I feel will make this the perfect shoutcasting tool include a promo controler (advert every x mins/tracks) and abillity to minimise into system tray to save the taskbar clutter. Excelent tool as a whole! - August 27, 2002 by Rob Wilkin