Add additional customize-ability to alternate podcasts
I have a mishmash of short and long podcasts and have the "alternate podcasts" setting enabled in the playlist enabled. The short podcast is issued more often and I end up with a ratio of about 10:1 short to long. I'd like to be able to select how many of each podcast count in the alternation of a podcast. For example if I have podcasts A and B. A is distributed often and is short. B is long but distributed once a week. What ends up happening is I get the following playlist:
A
B
A
B
A
A
A
A
A
Instead I would like to have something like this:
A
A
A
B
A
A
A
B
etc.
I'd use the regular sort but it makes it complicated, given the big number of podcasts affected.
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Mike Blazanin commented
I agree with this idea and have long wanted this or a similar feature. In fact, there's quite a bit of support for this and other similar ideas, but it seems that many posts wanting to achieve similar outcomes are phrased in different ways and so end up categorized as separate requests. I'm posting here in the hopes that we can start to unify these requests in order to gain more attention for them.
I would characterize these requests as involving some sort of accounting for the number of podcast episodes or time of a given podcast in the current playlist, as opposed to the default current behavior to simply alternate between all podcasts. This would enable podcasts with more episodes/more time in the playlist to be played more frequently, and prevent the problem of the accumulation of excess episodes at the end of the playlist.
For the oldest suggestion along these lines, see: https://podcastaddict.uservoice.com/forums/211997-general/suggestions/8105223--smart-sorting-option
For other similar requests, see:
https://podcastaddict.uservoice.com/forums/211997-general/suggestions/36456832-alternate-podcasts-considering-channel-queue-lengt
https://podcastaddict.uservoice.com/forums/211997-general/suggestions/38974180-smart-alternation-option-in-playlist
https://podcastaddict.uservoice.com/forums/211997-general/suggestions/36793843-alternate-podcast-feeds
https://podcastaddict.uservoice.com/forums/211997-general/suggestions/33506839-add-additional-customize-ability-to-alternate-podc
https://podcastaddict.uservoice.com/forums/211997-general/suggestions/35113660-sort-playlist-by-number-of-unplayed-episodes-in-poAs to your specific request, I think the more general solution to this is simply to weight the alternating by how many episodes of each podcast are currently in the playlist.
Algorithmically, one simple way this could be implemented by numbering within each podcast from 0 to 100, with step size determined by the number of podcasts in the playlist. Eg if there's 11 episodes in the playlist for a given podcast they're numbered 0, 10, 20, 30, ... 100. If there's 31 episodes, they're numbered 0, 3.33, 6.67, 10, ... 96.67, 100. Then you just sort by the assigned numbers and you have a playlist that's sorted by alternating podcasts weighted by number of episodes.
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Conrad commented
I have the same problem. I think this could be solved with some sort of "Alternate by priority" or "Alternate by Category" using weights. For example, I'd like it if I could choose 3/4 of my podcasts to be from one priority group, but allow 1/4 of my podcasts to be from a lower priority group.