Back in the day, when Winamp was still a respected Windows media player and not a disrespected phone app, I replaced my laptop and encountered Windows Vista. I could almost feel the OS crumbling under me as I tried to use it; with the benefit of hindsight, I guess Vista was trying to strangle the laptop’s drivers or I’d gotten a worse-than-average case of Vista speed.

Soon afterward, I had my first Linux laptop, which I got much better results out of overall. I didn’t have as much access to games, but I wasn’t as much into gaming at the time, and Battle for Wesnoth was enough to keep me busy for a while.

The thing I missed most was Winamp… until I got a taste of Banshee.

Banshee didn’t have as slick of an interface; I couldn’t reskin it and put it tinto a “windowshade mode” that fit into another window’s title bar. What it did have, and what I quickly found indispensable, was shuffle by score.

 

I have a lot of MP3s, and have had ever since I discovered CD ripping. My “normal” playlist is in the low to mid thousands of tracks, and my usual method of adding to it is just to shovel in a bunch of new tracks and see how much each track grows on me.

Managing that is, as you might guess, a bit of a chore.

With most music players, I’d kludge something together with play counts and skip counts and periodically check on which songs weren’t worth the space they took up in the shuffle queue. Banshee, though, had other options.

Shuffle by score worked like this:

1. Each track had a “score” from 0 to 100, which was the average percentage of it you listened to before skipping. Listened to the end almost every time? It’d have a high score, something like 95. Skipped it around half the time? Around 50. Almost always skipped it as soon as you heard the first notes? Well, you get the idea.

2. When a song came up in the shuffle queue, Banshee would make a RNG roll to see if it’d actually play. That track with a score of 95 would almost always be heard; one with a score of, say, 19 would be heard one-fifth as often.

There was also a “shuffle by rating” option that worked similarly: a two-star song would play 40 percent as often as a five-star song. Shuffle by score was my preferred mode, though, because it was essentially effortless. I didn’t have to adjust a song’s rating to make it play more or less often; choosing which songs to skip was enough.

This didn’t do much for the space my music library took up on disk, but I had a smart playlist for that (songs with scores of 10 or less, IIRC), and shuffle by score already accomplished most of what I was weeding my music library for in the first place…

 

I don’t use Banshee any more. I eventually switched back to Windows (for the games, once Vista was no more), and Banshee’s Windows port was… well, when I tried to load up my music library, it crashed. Every time. And since the Windows port is a few versions behind Banshee for Linux, which was last updated 11 years ago, I’m guessing it hasn’t gotten any better. And then my habits changed; these days, I mostly listen to music on my phone.

Shuffle by score is a feature over 15 years old, though. Why can I find no other music player that has it? I’d accept shuffle by rating, and I can’t find that, either. Hell, aside froom a Banshee dev’s old blog post, I haven’t found mention of either feature, anywhere on the Net.

Why?