Shaken, Not Stirred 2.0 is a Audio Utility product from stanford.edu, get 4 Stars SoftSea Rating, Shaken, not stirred is a jukebox software for generating shuffled playlists, with two distinctions from an ordinary shuffle: songs you like more are played more often (based on the 1 to 5 stars rating you assign in Windows Media Player), and repetitions of the same song are prevented from occurring too close together. How much more often favored songs are played, and how repetitions are separated, are options controlled by the user.
It also includes a separate utility to copy album art from your computer to your MP3 player, described on its own page.
The software uses Windows Media Player's database to know what songs are in your collection, and what their ratings are for setting how often to play each song. If you use Windows Media Player to sync your MP3 Player, and have assigned song ratings (1 to 5 stars), no preparation is needed and you can generate shuffled playlists with Shaken Not Stirred a few minutes after you download it. If you don't use Windows Media Player, some extra steps are required, described in the F.A.Q. and more fully in the program's Help.
For a simple example of what it's like to use this program, see the Quick Start Instructions, copied from the program's help file.
The selection example in the illustration to the right shows some of the program's abilities. The shuffled playlist will include all the songs in the users collection, with songs rated 5-stars played twelve times as often as 1-star songs. The songs in the second and third song groups included in the shuffle are already included as part of ALL SONGS, so their play frequency in those groups is in addition to how often they would be played based on their song ratings in ALL SONGS. The user wants to play New Songs that he/she recently added to their collection more often than old songs with the same rating. They also have a playlist of their favorite songs, presumably all rated 5 stars, that they want to hear almost twice as often as the other 5-star songs.
The playlist generated by this selection includes a lot of songs repeated multiple times. If you ran an ordinary shuffle on such a playlist, those songs would of course play more often. Unfortunately, normal random coincidences would sometimes put most or all the occurrences of a repeated song close together, even playing the same song twice in a row, with other long stretches of the playlist where you never hear the song. The "Distribution of repetitions" options shown in the illustration are provided to prevent that problem. The license of this audio & mp3 software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this Audio & MP3 software.