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Debian on a Macbook Pro Hyper-V internal network switch

Window 10 Groove music player: playlist limits

I'm using the Groove music player on Windows 10. I have a lot of songs; the main playlist has 5500 entries. I'd noticed that the shuffle option produced a more restricted set of music than I expected.

It seems this is a known feature - see this post: playlist limit. I considered reverting to Windows Media Player, but one nice feature of Groove is that the controls are presented on the lock screen. I figured I could perform my own shuffle of the playlist.

I run Debian under Windows System for Linux (WSL). It turns out there is a utility to do exactly what is required, shuf. One shell script, and a batch file to invoke it from Windows, later I had my musical horizons expanded.

A question remains; does Groove consider the playlist finished when it reaches the thousandth song? Maybe I won't live long enough to find out.

Here's the shell script and matching batch file:

shuffle.sh

  #!/bin/sh
  #
  # Shuffle +jazz+ playlist, as Groove can only shuffle up to 1000 songs.
  # Strip out #EXTINF lines prior to shuffle, or Groove is not happy.
  #
  PL_DIR=/mnt/c/Users/mark/Music/playlists
  grep -v "^#" ${PL_DIR}/+jazz+.m3u|shuf >${PL_DIR}/shuffle.m3u

shuffle.bat

  REM Assumes shuffle.sh is in the PATH and executable
  start C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe -d debian "shuffle.sh"
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Debian on a Macbook Pro Hyper-V internal network switch