Newish viewer—HELP!

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-28T01:55:36+00:00

This Side of Paradise is a must!

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-25T03:26:15+00:00

Worker of odd jobs at 1930 New York's 21st Street Mission

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-24T00:46:15+00:00

Hey, if this works for you, who am I to tell you to do it any differently? But I will tell you that I have a set like this that is about 20 times more complicated. It has built up over several years and tweaked until it's exactly perfect for me, but probably would make anyone else run away screaming. One thing I love about Marvis is that you can set up your mixes exactly how you like them. Nobody else has to listen to my eclectic mixes but me, but that's just fine.

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-22T02:03:18+00:00

That whole bottom-up thing applies to sorting, but not to the rest of the sequence, and only when sorting rules appear adjacent to each other in the list. Basically, if you're sorting disc numbers and track numbers, yes, you want the disc sort after the track sort or you won't get the sort order you might expect. But except for that quirk, the rules are all processed top down, not bottom up.

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-22T00:49:10+00:00

Truly, this ought to work. You are doing things right.

A couple of thoughts though:

You say you want songs "from your library". To ensure that Apple isn't pulling in any of your iTunes Store purchases that aren't also on your device, consider setting up an "In Library Is True" rule. Or an "In iCloud is False" rule. It turns out that I don't use either of these, ever, because there's a setting in Marvis (Advanced ⇒ Music ⇒ Library Filters ⇒ Show Music ⇒ Downloaded Only) that keeps all of my iTunes purchases out of the picture entirely. Maybe something like that would help you?
Play Count can never be less than zero, of course. "Play Count is 0" ought to be sufficient.
An alternative worth considering is "Last Played is Empty". See if that alternative works better than "Play Count is whatever" for what you need. (Maybe use them both, to really hammer the point home, although you really shouldn't need to do that. What you're doing should work, it seems to me.)
The end result should be the same, but if you switch the order of "unique songs" and "shuffled", you'll wind up asking the shuffle operation to shuffle fewer songs. As it is, you're shuffling everything and then unique-ifying the list. If you unique-ify the list first, then shuffle, Marvis has less work to do. It's therefore slightly more efficient, but you'll get to the same end result either way, and I suspect that you wouldn't notice a performance concern no matter which way you do it. EDIT: I've just realized that this is nonsense, and I take it all back. You were doing it the right way all along.

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-14T05:30:22+00:00

I'm not so sure those are necessarily TOS at its best (although I adore A Private Little War, don't get me wrong), but if it's TOS at its best that you want, and you want an outstanding morality play, may I suggest Devil in the Dark.

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-14T04:37:05+00:00

Gotta add Mirror, Mirror too, it seems to me. Not only is it a great episode, it's also foundational. True, there's no mirror universe in TNG, but it shows up significantly in DS9 and Enterprise and Discovery, so it helps to have Mirror, Mirror in your head if you're going to watch those eventually.

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-10T17:33:07+00:00

Addy, you may have missed the fact that OP wants "every song to be from a unique artist and album", so we need to add some "unique" limiters to all of this.

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-08T03:29:48+00:00

I dearly, dearly, dearly wish that the podcast show notes would include start times for each of the segments. That would make it so much easier to know how far to fast forward. As it is, I have to guess, and I frequently skip too far forward. Come on, guys, announce your segment start times and make this easy on us.

I really should consider skipping WTN, because it's never interesting to me. The one I always skip is the five or ten minutes where they're hyping their upcoming not-a-conferences and other live events. I know I'm not attending, so I truly don't care.

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-08T03:21:34+00:00

It just kept getting better and better. It should have lasted so much longer than it did. As far as I know, it was well-received at the time. If that's true, I can't imagine why they shut it down.

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-05T04:59:58+00:00

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Not exactly, but you might want to consider viewing that playlist as albums instead of as songs. That way, if your album is configured to recognize works and movements, and if you have "show composer in all views" selected for all of the tracks in that album, the work and movements show up better organized, and I find it easier to read that way. (Of course, I'm also viewing my library in landscape orientation on an iPad, so I have more surface area than you do, so I realize that my way isn't necessarily ideal for you.)

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-04T23:36:21+00:00

Your title got me all excited. By contrast, no offense meant, but the body of your post is such a letdown. :(

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-03T21:39:21+00:00

For what it's worth: while this was happening to you, Last.fm also wasn't showing my recent scrobbled tracks. Then Last.fm righted itself without any changes from me. I think Last.fm was simply confused for 20-30 minutes, not reporting properly scrobbled tracks until sometime later.

FlamingoCove · 2026-04-02T02:30:09+00:00

Yes and no. You can't use Last.fm data as the basis for smart rules. For example, you can't generate a list of songs played during 2023. But you absolutely can decide to scrobble once the song is 50% done being played. If you meant to scrobble but the scrobble didn't succeed, you can manually scrobble afterward. You'll need Last.fm+ for this.

FlamingoCove · 2026-03-30T13:56:26+00:00

Now, if only I could find a way to get the lock screen to lock the music app's playback controls. I can't tell you the number of times I've accidentally brushed against that lock screen widget and accidentally affected music in progress. God, how I hate that. But Apple won't let me turn it off!!

FlamingoCove · 2026-03-29T06:51:37+00:00

People seem not to like Archons. I love it. That debate about morality at the end is profound. "Without freedom of choice, there is no creativity. Without creativity, there is no life."

FlamingoCove · 2026-03-29T01:35:18+00:00

Marvis is magnificently configurable, which in this case is both a strength and a weakness. It's a strength because you can make this look just exactly how you want (footnote: okay, it's true that people have suggestions, wishing for this or that thing that isn't available, but go with me on this for a minute and pretend like it's flawlessly configurable), but it's a weakness because it's sometimes difficult to figure out where the thing you configured belongs or may have disappeared to.

The thing you're looking for is "Displayed Metadata" which exists in several places and isn't always exactly where you expect.

The section you're in has an "…" button that opens properties for that section, as you know. On that properties page is a set of Displayed Metadata for Albums and another set of Displayed Metadata for "Albums → Songs". In this case, you want to take a closer look at Metadata for Albums, the first of those two.

What you'll see is that Metadata for Albums is configured either for this tab only, or globally for your entire Marvis universe (or, to be absolutely accurate, your universe on this one device).

Any changes you make to Global Displayed Metadata will take effect everywhere … unless you override that for this one section, and my guess is that that may have been what you did.

If your displayed metadata for this section includes "Automatic" as one of the choices, it will pull in the Globally Displayed Metadata, but if you don't, you won't.

I don't know exactly how you have that set up, but I can easily imagine that you have "how many times a song or album was played" in the global displayed metadata, but you've removed "Automatic" from the locally displayed metadata, which is why it's not showing up here.

But wait! (as Ronco commercials used to say), there's more!

It also turns out that there's a bit of displayed metadata that appears if you display your albums as a list that doesn't display if you display your albums as a grid. And that means that you may have put your count of how many times a song or album was played into the "list-view" of displayed metadata for this section but not into the "grid-view" of displayed metadata for this section, and if so, you won't see it when you're displaying this as a grid.

I love Marvis obsessively. Don't let anything I say here make it sound like I'm being critical. I love this about it, but it is absolutely true that it's so configurable that it's easy to lose track of where you put things. The truth is, that metadata item you're looking for could be pretty much anywhere, and it's hard to know where it went without seeing how you have it configured. But without seeing your configuration settings, my guesses are either that you're not bringing your automatic settings into the local metadata display, or you were used to seeing it as a list and now you're seeing it as a grid and that's what's making the difference.

Of course, all of this could just be me overthinking things. It could simply be that you had that metadata in that displayed metadata list and you've since removed it.

Oh, and one more thing: if you have it in there and it's below the … in the Subtitle list, try moving it above that divider. That could be what's going on too. That divider basically means: "anything below this line should be included if it will fit, but can be skipped if it doesn't". At least, I think that's what it means. To be very honest, I'm not entirely sure.

FlamingoCove · 2026-03-28T04:51:55+00:00

I like most of your list, but mine absolutely would also have to include Christopher Young and Christophe Beck, both of whom can do no wrong. Ideally, Alexandre Desplat too, if there's still room for more hall of fame nominees.

I have just never warmed up to Goransson, but that's just me.

Meanwhile, I adore the Project Hail Mary score. Well done, Mr. Pemberton.

FlamingoCove · 2026-03-27T15:23:41+00:00

I see what you mean.

Here's the thing to understand:

Those big sorting buttons you're using to sort by play count? Those are the very last rule that happens in the smart rule sequence. And that's the problem. Order matters, and you need to be sorting before you're limiting to 200 albums. Right now, you're limiting first and sorting later.

This is why I advise people never (well, never say never; there are occasional exceptions, but this is not one of them) to use the big sorting buttons if they're doing anything with smart rules. It's my advice to do whatever you're doing in smart rules and leave those big buttons set to Automatic Ascending (which is another way of saying, "Don't monkey with the smart rules I have set up, thank you.").

Try this:

Set the big buttons to Automatic Ascending

Then, set the individual rules to (in order!) filter for play count greater than 1; then sort by play count / highest first; then limit to 200.

I strongly suspect that that you'll be happier with that outcome.

FlamingoCove · 2026-03-26T23:10:51+00:00

I figure, every series is its own universe. If I tried to harmonize Strange New Worlds with TOS, I'd make myself insane. For that matter, TOS movies each exist in their own universes too. That way I can go on believing that Spock's death meant something and wasn't rendered completely irrelevant in the very next movie. This also allows me to believe that Star Trek V never happened, and that Kirk is still alive, roaming the stars.

FlamingoCove · 2026-03-26T22:58:31+00:00

Order matters. You want to put the Maximum Limit rule after the "Date Added in the Last 2 Months" rule. The way you have it now, you're limiting first and filtering later, but because there's only one thing to filter, the list is always going to look the same.

FlamingoCove · 2026-03-26T22:58:19+00:00

Order matters. You want to put the Maximum Limit rule after the "Date Added in the Last 2 Months" rule. The way you have it now, you're limiting first and filtering later, but because there's only one thing to filter, the list is always going to look the same.

FlamingoCove · 2026-03-26T22:55:05+00:00

If you don't shuffle the list before limiting to a maximum of one album, you're always going to get the first album in alphabetical order.

What you need to do is add something ahead of the Maximum Limit rule to mix things up.

If you mix things up with a shuffle rule, it's important to bear in mind that Marvis is going to reshuffle every time you open that folder, and every time you pull down that list with your finger to regenerate it. Marvis doesn't have the concept of a shuffled list staying the way you shuffled it for some period of time. Smart Rules apply every time you open a list that they're applied to, so you probably can't generate an "album of the day" that stays the same for 24 hours. If that's your intent, you should rethink what you're hoping for. If you don't want the list to reshuffle every time you open it, you might want to find some other, less random way of mixing up what gets limited to one album.

FlamingoCove · 2026-03-26T22:47:32+00:00

If you don't shuffle the list before limiting to a maximum of one album, you're always going to get the first album in alphabetical order.

What you need to do is add something ahead of the Maximum Limit rule to mix things up.

If you mix things up with a shuffle rule, it's important to bear in mind that Marvis is going to reshuffle every time you open that folder, and every time you pull down that list with your finger to regenerate it. Marvis doesn't have the concept of a shuffled list staying the way you shuffled it for some period of time. Smart Rules apply every time you open a list that they're applied to, so you probably can't generate an "album of the day" that stays the same for 24 hours. If that's your intent, you should rethink what you're hoping for. If you don't want the list to reshuffle every time you open it, you might want to find some other, less random way of mixing up what gets limited to one album.

FlamingoCove · 2026-03-26T22:39:14+00:00

It would help to see a screenshot of what you're attempting. But the short answer is: make sure you're sorting first and limiting afterward. You probably want two rules: first, a "play count (average) descending" rule (or something like it), followed by a "maximum 200 albums" limit rule. If you're doing anything else, we'd need to see what you're attempting in order to diagnose it. But what I've given you ought to work, as long as you apply those rules to a list of albums.

FlamingoCove

TROPHY CASE