A couple of further enhancements?

[Pastim]

I have been trying to think about how a true 'random play' across a large subset of a music collection might be implemented in the UPnP architecture.

Firstly, 'shuffle', as implemented by several control points, is not an appropriate tool. It is not practical to try and download many thousands of track details to a playlist on a client and then shuffle it. I did try briefly, on bubbleupnp (android) and upplay (ubuntu). It took a long time to download a large list of many thousands of items and they both gave up on the job with strange errors.

bubbleupnp does have a 'random play' of 'n tracks' feature across all tracks. I don't know how it does this, but there's nothing that would do the same over a subset, let alone by 'groups' or 'works'.

When one has a large list of groups of tracks it seems to me that the server must be the right place to randomise this. It has all the data, and (usually) the CPU power. Loading many thousands of entries to a client seems inherently the wrong thing to do. What's actually wanted is the ability for the control point to see a sensible number of tracks/groups in a pre-randomised playlist, and then have the list topped up when it has almost been played out.

To illustrate what I'm trying to do, I want to play random (classical) Works containing one or more tracks at a Rating (one of my tags) of 80 or more - ie stuff I really like. I have many hundreds of these, with around 7,000 tracks in all. Sometimes I just want to play random Works of any class (well over 20,000 tracks in a few thousand Works). Other times it might be Works in a Genre, or by a Composer, etc. At any one time, 10 such Works can contain anything from 10 to several hundred tracks, depending on the Works, and this is plenty for one playlist on the client side. It could last minutes or hours. The playlist doesn't need to be longer than this, but needs topping up when I'm near the end of the list. If the client was dumb enough the server could do this itself by pushing items onto the playlist. I can't quite see how this type of functionality could be provided with the UPnP architecture, but others may have ideas.