I was thinking about this, and I thought of a way that would allow both player models to do this (know which songs were most recently played) without needing a clock.

The player could keep a permanent "counter" that simply incremented with each song played. This counter would be saved to the hard disk along with all the other bits of the player state. Each time a song was played, this counter would increment and add itself to the database entry for that song.

The weighted shuffle algorithm could then simply sort based on this counter value. In fact, the code for that would be simpler than trying to interpret a time/date value.

The counter wouldn't even have to be a very large integer. A 32-bit long integer should be more than enough, allowing the counter to reach 2,147,483,647 before the database would wrap around. Assuming a 5-minute average song, you can only play 10,5120 songs in a year if the player plays nonstop. By my math, it would take 20,428 years to roll the counter over.

Empeg guys, thoughts on this?

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Tony Fabris