Can my Party Shuffle problems be solved? Is anybody else experiencing this?

Question

There are 3 glitches i have encountered using Party Shuffle (PS) in iTunes (v 7.0.2.16) that i don't know how to fix:
1) When PS displays/sets the upcoming songs i'll be listening to, which are pulled from one of my smart playlists, a song will frequently show up twice in the shuffle queue. The higher the number of songs i have displayed "on deck", the more likely i am to see songs repeat, but i'll often have a song listed twice in just a 10 song shuffle queue, and sometimes thrice. Once the song is actually played though, it won't be put back into my PS queue anytime soon (because the smart playlist i have PS pull the songs from is set to only include songs i haven't listened to in the last month and have a playcount less than 10 or so (which by the way is an otherwise great way to sortof normalize the "randomness" of the iTunes' shuffle probabilities).) Nevertheless, it's not until the song actually plays and in turn updates the Last Played and Playcount fields for the song that it will take it out of the smartplaylist... but by then the song has already been queued multiple times in PS. (By the way, my Smart Shuffle playback option in iTunes preferences is set to the "least likely" extreme.) Anyway, it sounds like a lot of people are having issues with songs repeating too much and with iTunes' ghost preferences for some songs over others.
2) I've also noticed that a number of people were having trouble getting PS to play songs continuously instead of one-at-a-time (i.e. having to press play again after each song ends to get the next queued one going). I heard this was taken care of with the latest update - v 7.0.2.16 (although i wish there actually were a way to toggle a continuous play option). Anyway, the recomened solution at the time seemed to be to set the PS option for displaying the number of recently played songs to something other than 0. So, i thought i would change mine to 0 to see if it actually would only play one-at-a-time. It did not. Instead, it started to do something even stranger. It now updates the Last Played and Playcount fields for the new song coming into the queue instead of the song that just finished playing. This isn't really the biggest deal to me, since i usually like to see what the last few songs played were, but it's a glitch nonetheless.
3) The only other thing i've personally noticed, which isn't really the biggest deal either, is that sometimes when i tell iTunes to "clear album artwork" from a song... well, it doesn't do it. So i have the wrong album cover showing up in PS for songs that are playing. The only way it seems i can get rid of it is to replace it with some different image/cover... which can be a little annoying when you don't want to take the time to go trackdown the correct 200 x 200 pixel image for the album.
Well, i hope someone can help... especially with the first one. I'm guessing these issues can't be resolved until some future updates are released to deal with them. I hope you can prove me wrong though. I also hope Apple has some people listening in these forums for people talking about this stuff so they can fix these bugs... 'cause i don't know of anywhere someone can report an iTunes software bug/glitch.
Cheers!
Dell Dimension XPS T600r   Windows XP   Pentium 3 600MHz, 32mb video card

Answer 1

I am still on 6.0.5 so I can't really deal with your question, but just an observation.
You say the source for your party shuffle is a smart playlist. How many songs are there in the smart playlist? The fewer there are the more likely you are to get repeats in your party suffle list. Appologies if this is obvious.