Would anyone be interested in an Album Shuffle Mode? For example, if you had a playlist named (Celtic) and under (Celtic) it had the artists Capercaillie, Gaelic Storm, and Great Big Sea, and under each artist it had several of their albums. When in Album Shuffle Mode, if you select the playlist (Celtic), it would pick an album at random, and play it all the way through in the albums original order, then select another album, etc. The definition of an album would be any playlist that had music tracks in it (instead of just more playlists).

I also own a PJB100 mp3 player and it has this feature and I use it alot.

Yes.

You can sorta-kinda do this now using the always randomize playlist property, but, since it's always on and it only affects the playlist itself, not sub-playlists, you have to create a new playlist with appropriate albums in it.

It would be nice if there was a way to select playlists-with-no-subplaylists as the item on which to perform shuffles, but even that wouldn't necessarily work all the time.

Maybe it does make the most sense to just set it up beforehand.

Yes, it would be nice to have a 'by album' shuffle (though I have some albums that are subdivided e.g. the "Concerto for a Rainy Day" in ELO's "Out of the Blue" album).

I manage reasonably well by linking all the albums into a big "Albums" playlist that's set to always shuffle, and I do most of my listening on that list, but I can go and listen to any artist in order in my "Artists" playlist. Conceivably, you could have several shuffled-albums playlist for different moods etc.

I'm so glad that the playlist framework we've been given is so accommodating!

I have a playlist set up to do this, though I did have to manually copy all my albums into it. It actually didn't take long to set up and one of the bonuses is that I was able remove "Best of" albums as well as those that only have a few good tracks. This yields a set of cohesive albums played at random and is one of the "modes" I like to use when listening to music.

did have to manually copy all my albums into it. It actually didn't take long to set up

I wanted to point this up in case anyone else was having second thoughts about doing it this way. When you first think of the idea of creating a "shuffled albums" playlist, it sounds like it would be a lot of work. But for most people's collections, it actually only takes a few minutes. (With the possible exception of Paul Grzelak's collection. )

Just make a playlist named "(Shuffled Albums)", make sure it's tagged with the "always randomize" flag. Then copy each of your album playlists into it (hold down the CTRL key to make sure they're copies and not "moves"). Make sure they aren't tagged with "always randomize" (they probably aren't). Then just turn off Shuffle on the player's main menu, and play that playlist.