Most music systems create powerful databases of mass music collections, but fail to provide access to the information or supply poor user interfaces - making them little more than virtual multi-disc changers with the usual add ons, such as slicing the information by artist, year, genre and album.

This feature request is designed to (a) allow the end-user to quickly fulfil their music listening desires and (b) set SqueezeCenter a level above the 'rest'.

Currently the Advanced Search facility allows the user to search the database by various key data but does not, as it stands, allow the user to create and realise a number of simple desires (nor fulfil the potential of the music database information available).

Some example user desires:

- provide themed music for a party; e.g., quickly create a set list that randomly plays songs from the 1980's (or any other decade)

- play a random mix of all music by multiple (perhaps similar) artists, e.g., Bruce Hornsby and Bruce Hornsby And The Range

Or a more sophisticated choice:

- play a random mix of all music by <group of artists> between <year 1> and <year 2> from the genre <specified genre(s)>

Additionally, once the Advanced Search returns the results, songs can only be added one at a time to a playlist, making the results less usable than they could be.

As a first step, this feature request proposes:

1) Adding two user definable fields to the Year part of the Advanced Search, allowing the user to narrow the search to between 2 years, e.g., 1980 and 1989 to allow all results to be confined to the 80's.

2) When the Advanced Search displays its results, enhance it in three ways:

i) have a shuffle, repeat and quick play option; the quick play option starts playing the results according to the repeat and shuffle options.  Now the user can with just a few clicks create an "80's only" playlist for a party.

ii) have an option to create a playlist containing all the results (or append to an existing playlist - this is a very important consideration as it allows the user to effectively create sophisticated query combinations from the results of multiple searches)

iii) allow the user to selectively add the results of the advanced search - although this could equally be achieved by allowing the user to create a playlist as in (ii) and then subsequently delete/edit the playlist

The above would allow users to quickly create sophisticated and valuable subsets of their music collection for instant playback; create many, many hours of music for a themed party in literally a few clicks.

Perhaps for a later phase:

3) When the Random Mix feature is invoked, just like as is with Genre, allow the user to pick multiple artists (i.e., confine the random mix to specified artists) or albums