Symfonium support many ways to play music more or less randomly, so let’s explain all the different modes and functions.
Personal mixes
Those mixes uses your listening habits and likes to try to build a pleasant queue that ensure that you have enough things you like, enough things you forget about, and nothing you dislike.
See below for the different ways to start a personal mix. The mixes are tied to what is visible in the screen list data and affected by the global filters like enabled media providers, libraries, available offline, …
Without going too much in the details the mixes are more or less built like this:
- Remove a percentage of the last recently played songs to avoid repetition.
- Remove songs with a rating of 1 or 2 star as considered not liked.
- Do some magic to generate buckets more or less like the following:
- most played / best rated / favorites
- at least 3 star rating or already played
- the rest
- Pick songs in the buckets with a proper randomisation to ensure the wanted distribution and also ensuring album / artist distribution to avoid repetition.
Instant mixes
Those mixes are created based on the artists genres then are passed to the personal mix generator.
When starting an instant mix from an artist, that artist is ensured to be seen relatively frequently in the mix.
Radio mixes (Requires version 5.7.0+)
Those mixes are only available for providers who expose an similar artist API.
Symfonium will query the provider for that list then use that as a source for the personal mix generator.
The provider needs to be online for this to work.
If your provider does not return any data, or there’s network errors, Symfonium will fallback to Instant mixes.
Shuffle
When starting media via the shuffle button, the visible media are shuffled before starting the playback.
But this is not a fully random shuffle as it’s done to ensure the least possible repetition of artist / album in the resulting playlist.
Shuffled (Shuffle mode)
This function is accessible from the now playing view or the now playing queue list and randomize the current playlist.
The randomize is really random, so you can end up with a lot of artist / album repetition but the source order is preserved when you disable the shuffle mode.