I'm trying to create Random Music Player and could use help!

TLDR: I stream music in my dorm room 24/7 and the stations I listen to loop every 19 hours and 41 minutes, and it gets old. So I want to make a random music player with matlab.

I am using the randi function to generate a random number so that it chooses one. Now, I need it to realize that is the name of a song, grab it, and then play it.

Here is the code I have so far! Any help would be greatly appreicated as I am a beginer. (I know that I only have 12 songs so far, this is just a proof of concept for now).

r = randi(12);
%use the random number generated to select a song (all named 1.m4a or
%12.m4a or whatever)
%plug the song into the folling code that plays the song
[a, Fs] = audioread('__________.m4a');
plot(a(:,1))
p = audioplayer(a,Fs);
play(p)
%repeat process. I will eventually turn this into a fucntion that can
%smartly choose between playing another song or letting us hear from a DJ
%in the Fallout Video games, but right now I just want to get the random
%generation perfected. 

Answer 1

[Kodavati Mahendra]

% clear all; close all; clc
MusicList = dir('*.m4a');
while(1)
    r = randi(length(MusicList),1,1)
    [a, Fs] = audioread(MusicList(r).name);
    plot(a(:,1))
    p = audioplayer(a,Fs);
    play(p);
    pause(length(a)/Fs);
end

I am not sure if I understand your question completely. Does this help?

This gets the list of .m4a files in the current directory and plays them randomly indefinitely.

[Image Analyst]

To do it like a "shuffle" so there are no repeats until the entire list has played, you'd have to call randperm() in advance of the loop

sortOrder = randperm(length(MusicList));
while(1)  % Actually using while like this is bad
    r = sortOrder(count);  % Get current index
    count = mod(count + 1, length(MusicList)); % Increment the index in sortOrder.

[Ian Mason]

Awesome! Thank you so much! That was a huge help and you understood the question perfectly!

Just to add on one last part to that, as I have it plotting the song, is there a way to get the songs title at the top of the plot so that I know what I'm listening to? The end goal is to have this be on 24/7 in my dorm room and then to download a bunch of old tunes off internet archive and put them in the directory, so there will always be something new in there, and if I want to add it to my phone I know which file to grab.

Thank you again!

[Mahendra]

Just add the following line after plot() command.

title(MusicList(r).name(1:end-4));

dir command generates a struct of all the music files. struct has 6 fields in it (name, folder, date, bytes, isdir, datenum). double click on MusicList variable in workspace. You can see its contents.

[Ian Mason]

Awesome! That seems to generate another random number though, instead of the song title. I will see what I can do to fix that! Adapting both of the scripts, I only have one other problem... Matlab seems to complain when I want to pause it. I will type stop(p) in the command window and it doesn't seem to stop. In fact, the only way I can get Matlab to stop is to actually force quit it. Any ideas?

Thank you so much again!

[Ian Mason]

UPDATE: I was using numbered music files, and importing the actaul titled songs seems to have fixed the naming error.

[Ian Mason]

Thank you for your guidence into this! If anyone else wants to try this, my code is...

%HOLD control c to stop because it won't stop on it's own

mus = dir('mus/*.m4a');

dj = dir('dj/*.m4a');

while true

rd = randi(length(dj),1,1);

[a, Fs] = audioread(strcat(dj(rd).folder,"/",dj(rd).name));

plot(a(:,1))

title(dj(rd).name(1:end-4));

p = audioplayer(a,Fs);

play(p)

pause(length(a)/Fs);

for ii=1:randi(4)+3

rR = randi(length(mus),1,1);

[a2, Fs2] = audioread(strcat(mus(rR).folder,"/",mus(rR).name));

plot(a2(:,1))

title(mus(rR).name(1:end-4));

p = audioplayer(a2,Fs2);

play(p)

pause(length(a2)/Fs2);

end

end