Say you want to give people who play your game the option to play their own mp3''s as background music. They might copy the songs they want to hear to a game folder, or set a custom folder in the game settings. If they add a large collection of songs, you might want to give them the ability to make a subset of these songs they really want to hear this time. A playlist. But since they''re busy playing your game, they don''t want to spend a lot of time creating this playlist. Instead, they want a quick and simple way to let the ''music engine'' know what kind of music they want to hear. Based on this quick selection, a playlist is created dynamically. What I would like to discuss here, is how such a ''fast but working'' kind of playlist creation should be made.. Some ideas; - pick a genre and play songs that belong to this genre (problem; if you''re genres are too generic, someone might only have music from one or two genres, and if you make em too specific, people might not know more than half of your genres.. which would make the selection bloated) - pick a song and play ''similar songs'' - set some parameters like "no songs that are longer than 5 minutes, and none that are shorter than 1.5 minutes, and only songs i''ve played in the last 48 hours" - let the music engine pick a song at random and you only give feedback whether this is what you like or not -> so the next song selection can be made better (based on this, a personal ''profile'' could be created) - ... ??

You could let them make sub directories and then at start up they could tell you what directory to play from, also you could make a skip song button so they could just move to the next or you could even have it so that there is a tiny display that shows the current song and the next song.. and then you can drop down on the next song to pick what you''d like next and have a button that will take you to the next right away...

I think something as nice as to let them pick there own music is enough though.. I mean unless they are playing your game to listen to music they aren''t going to mind listening to songs that they have choosen themselves..

Sounds like your really looking into everything the User will want.. I just hope the gameplay is as well thought out..

Turt99