Play Doctor

Play Doctor is a Media Center feature which intelligently creates playlists or Playcharts from your library and other sources.

You can find Play Doctor in the Playing Now pane when no media is playing. If it is not visible, look for two small up and down arrows at the very top of the pane. Click on the right down arrow and Play Doctor will appear.

The selection uses various fields or tags from the types of file involved.

Thanks to Marko for these instructions. Original Post

Set a search rule under "Set rules for files that can be included" if you wish, then just press the play button.

The rules will be remembered next time, so in theory, this could be a one time only entry. My advice is to keep it as brief as possible. I use exclude tracks played in the past seven days and exclude everything rated less than three stars.

Press the play button on the Doctor's interface, and off it will go, picking tracks at random from your library. If it plays something you really aren't in the mood for, skip it and the Doctor will try not to play those kind of tracks again during this session.

Try it, I think you'll like it. After setting a simple base rule to start off with, next time, all you need to do is go to Playing Now and press the Play Doctor's play button... you do not need to choose anything at all, except to press the play button, of course!

If you want to reduce the workload even further, you could close MC, then browse to the Media Center 16 program folder. In there, you'll find another folder called "Data", go in there, and create a new folder called called "Custom Resources". Extract the file from the attached zip into this new folder, launch MC, press ctrl+alt+r on your keyboard and Play Doctor will kick off. The keyboard shortcut is global, so MC doesn't even need to be in focus for it to work. If ctrl+alt+r is already taken by another application on your PC, just close MC, open the xml file you extracted earlier in a txt editor, change the r to a different letter and save it.

Have fun. Please try my proposal (the "Custom Resources" is entirely optional, but highly recommended) before dismissing it, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

That's how I use the Play Doctor. There is more you can do with it that I don't fuss with... For example, you could use a Genre filter in the 'files to be included' area, then save that 'prescription' for later use. This way, you could have several channels saved for those times when you know what you're in the mood for, but still not sure what to actually play... just pick a repeat prescription from your saved list and let the Doctor sort it out for you!