What is the fastest way to get a random MPMediaItem

[cpprulez]

Hello, gurus
Can you please share some ideas how to get one or more random MPMediaItems from user's iPod Library. Any call to [MPMediaQuery songsQuery].items is waaaaay too slow - for a library of just 800 songs it takes about 19 seconds on my iPod Touch 2G to execute the query. Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated. Thank you

[Robert Paulson]

I have never worked with this so this is a speculation...

... but! couldn't you generate a random number and then retrieve a single song based on that random number?

Just an idea. Sorry if that doesn't make sense or is not possible...

Cheers,
Bob

[cpprulez]

Thank you, Robert
I thought of that too, but I'm afraid it won't work, because the persistent id of a song is of type Int64

[AlanTaylor]

Originally Posted by cpprulez

Thank you, Robert
I thought of that too, but I'm afraid it won't work, because the persistent id of a song is of type Int64

You should build an MPMediaCollection, then count how many there are.
Next, generate a random number and use the count to limit the maximum random number.
Finally, call the item from the collection at that index. It's almost instantaneous.