Randomising order of auto playlist (WMP12)

There's two ways of randomising a playlist, you can turn shuffle on, or you can randomise the order of the playlist itself, then play it in sequence.

I can't work out how to randomise the order of my playlist in WMP12. I know that there's a "Randomize Playback Order" as one of the criteria you can add to an auto playlist, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. I suspect the structure of my auto playlist is the cause. Simplified, it does this:

Include
Music in my library
My rating is 5 stars
And also include
Music in my library
My rating is at least 4 stars
And also include
Music in my library
My rating is at least 3 stars
And also include
Music in my library
Music is at least 2 stars

The effect of this is that my 5star tracks are included four times, my 4star tracks are included three times, and so on.
What I end up with is bizarre. I get a bunch of 5star tracks, followed by a bunch of 4star tracks, followed by a bunch of more-or-less randomised 5/4/3star tracks followed by a bunch of randomised 5/4/3/2star tracks.

I seem to recall that Windows Media Player had an undocumented way of shuffling a playlist again, manually, but either that's gone, or I can't find it (the smart money's on me not being able to find it).

Any ideas?

Incidentally, I tried Party Shuffle, using it to play my "Weighted" playlist. However, faced with a playlist containing duplicate tracks (my 5star tracks occur 4 times each) it eliminates the duplicates, and this removes the weighting.

WMP's auto playlist randomizing isn't really bizarre if you realize that each Randomize Playback Order filter only affects the single Music in my library section that the filter is located in. So each section is randomized individually, but there's no 'mixing' of the sections.

To shuffle the currently playing playlist, click the 'checkmark' icon in the top-right corner of the Play tab, and select Shuffle list. Is that the undocumented way that you're referring to?

Just out of curiosity, why isn't it an option to just turn shuffle mode on?

Just for completeness...

If I turn shuffle on, then it plays tracks selected randomly from the playlist. But this list contains at least 10,000 entries, so if I want to find the track that's actually playing (I might want to adjust the number of stars), I have to scroll through a huge number of tracks. Quite often, the track has finished and the player has moved on to the next track. Which was selected at random, so no help in finding the track I was interested in.

When I can persuade the shuffled playlist to appear in the main player window, I can find which tracks have been recently played, as the date-last-played column shows an abrupt discontinuity between played and not-yet-played tracks.

If I'm not mistaken, WMP should automatically scroll the Play tab to the currently playing song whenever the current song changes.

To view the recently played songs, you could create an auto playlist: in WMP's library, click the arrow next to Create playlist and select Create auto playlist. Enter a name for the playlist, and under Music in my library, add the condition Date Last Played. Then further customize the condition so that it reads Date Last Played Is More Recent Than Yesterday. Click OK to create the auto playlist.

Yes, indeed, WMP does automatically scroll to the currently playing track when in shuffle mode. This is why I avoided shuffle, because it made it difficult to find the previous track if I didn't get to it in time.

Your suggestion of an auto playlist for recently played tracks solves this puzzle, thank you.

It also solves another problem which haunts me... Almost every day I wake up with a few bars of a tune going through my head. I recognise the music, but not well enough to identify it. But the snippet is nearly always from a piece of music that I've heard in the previous 24 hours. And this is usually from WMP. The auto playlist will help me identify the snippets.

Of course, the snippets often come from TV programmes, and then I have to figure out other ways of identifying the snippets. I've tried online music recognition, but it rarely recognises the obscure music that makes up most of my library.

Whilst writing this post, I left the shuffle mode running in the background, and it's already played two tracks which intrigue me. This will keep me off the streets!