March 21, 2005
The RoboDJ Weighted Shuffler for Winamp
Somebody noticed that I use the RoboDJ weighted shuffler plugin for Winamp. They also used it regularly but had lost it after a Windows reinstall. Since the robodj.org page is no longer up, they asked if I had a copy that I could send them. I responded that I did, but by that time they had found it online, albeit on a page that doesn’t turn up when you Google for it.
Since I have a somewhat decent Google PageRank for reasons that will forever be a mystery to me, let me see if I can rectify this matter by linking to Burnap’s excellent RoboDJ for Winamp plugin as many times as possible. Alas, he’s no longer maintaining RoboDJ, but he does have the source code available if anybody out there wants to take a crack at it. And of course you can still download and install RoboDJ.
Basically, RoboDJ is a weighted-shuffler plugin for the Winamp MP3 player for Windows. It’s ideal for those of you who don’t like building lots of playlists and prefer just to put your entire music collection on random shuffle. The weighted part means that if you assign a song a higher weight, RoboDJ will give it a higher probability of selection. Pretty handy for automatically listening your favorite songs and artists more often than the other songs that you have. And did I mention that it’s free (although donations are welcome)?
Yeah, I know the Mac crowd will say that iTunes already does this with the Party Shuffle, but for those of us who do our music listening at work and have to compile on our machines, the slim and trim Winamp is far preferable to iTunes. And I like that RoboDJ gives you finer control than iTunes’s four-star system, which doesn’t let you specify how much more often it plays a four-star song than a three-star song. To be sure RoboDJ’s user interface isn’t great, but it does the job. You can always change weights manually by editing a text file.
Anyway, even if you don’t weight any of your songs, RoboDJ is still indispensible because, let’s face it, the shuffle feature for most MP3 players sucks ass. Most of them are not very random at all, and some of them are just downright weird. For example, I’ve noticed that my Nomad Jukebox 3 will choose a lot of songs from artists alphabetically close to each other and then jump to somewhere else in the alphabet and stay there for a while, etc. This often results in several songs in a row of the same artist which I find quite annoying. RoboDJ’s shuffle algorithm is superior and doesn’t have that problem. Indeed, I’d even taken to creating randomized playlists with RoboDJ and loading them onto the Nomad (even though it kinda defeats the purpose of having your entire music collection on a portable player).
Anyhow, enough of my ramblings (I’d go on to talk about my other music listening habits, but then I might dilute the PageRank by linking to other sites). If you use Winamp, give RoboDJ a try!
March 21, 2005 06:30 PM in Music, Technology | PermalinkHi there,
Sorry for using this space, but I couln’t figure out any other way of contacting you.
I read your comment on Volokh and found we have a lot in common. Thanks for writing.
Posted by Robert at 03/22/05, 02:46 PM (link)Robert: Sorry for using this space, but I couln’t figure out any other way of contacting you.
No problemo. I never mind off-topic comments, especially when there isn’t even a comment thread. :)
Anyway, you can also reach me at my easy-to-guess Gmail address, but comments are just as good (if not better, since it makes it look like I have readers).
I read your comment on Volokh and found we have a lot in common. Thanks for writing.
Sure. It’s a topic that I’ve been thinking about off and on for a while, and haven’t gotten around to writing it down. Seemed like as good a forum as any. I’ll probably expand upon it later. For one, I forgot to mention that I often dye my hair blue. Of course, having black hair, it’s not always immediately obvious, so I guess that fits right into wanting to differentiate myself yet not wanting to stick out.
Glad to hear you identified with it. I kinda thought I was unusual (albeit I guess that was somewhat by design, if only subconsciously).
Posted by fling93 at 03/22/05, 03:05 PM (link)Anyone know if anyone has decided to pick up the development of this great plugin? I wish I knew more about programming. This is something that Winamp needed from the beginning!
Posted by SisXtian at 04/06/05, 04:57 PM (link)Unfortunately, I don’t think anybody has. I keep thinking about taking a crack at it myself, but I tend not to enjoy programming in my free time (which is another clue I’m probably not in the right field). Maybe I’ll feel more like it if the startup I work at goes IPO and I can retire early. :)
Posted by fling93 at 04/11/05, 05:04 PM (link)You know what, the only thing that would be great is that it wouldn’t crash on a winamp exit. Due to this winamp exits unclean and so it doesn’t save settings at all. Other than that it’s a great app and I thank you for your efforts in writing this article :)
Posted by voidzero at 05/20/05, 04:48 PM (link)It doesn’t crash for me, but yeah, he never finished ironing out all the issues. Sorry to hear it doesn’t work so well for you. :(
Anyway, thanks for the comment!
Posted by fling93 at 05/20/05, 08:29 PM (link)Do You know of a WinAmp plugin that allows you to program songs in your play list? ie: song 1, 6, 15, 101, 1101, 1235 etc. I have about 2244 songs on a 30Gig HD in an old PII computer with a IR receiver/remote control and a 4 X 20 LCD display - (track number, bitrate, artist, spectrum analyzer, etc). I would like to choose at any given time songs from my playlist rather than create individual play lists.
Posted by TheKid at 05/24/05, 06:07 PM (link)Well, I’m not an expert on all the Winamp plugins, and I’m not sure I understand exactly what you’re trying to do. Winamp by itself has a jump function (hit ‘j’) which calls up a list of all the songs, and then you can type in search text to narrow it down to find the song you want. I’m not sure how usable that would be from a remote, though.
Via Google, I did find a Jump to track plugin, but I’ve never tried it myself.
Hope that helps!
Posted by fling93 at 05/24/05, 08:41 PM (link)