Can I configure the manager to avoid playing the same track more than once in a given period of time?
Yes, the manager has always done this automatically. By default, it will avoid playing any track more than once within a 6-hour period if at all possible.
There are a number of caveats to this feature, however:
This limit is only applied to general rotation playlists, and only if the playlist is set to "random" mode. It is assumed that if you place the same track multiple times in a scheduled or interval playlist, and/or if you setup a specific playback order for your general rotation playlists, then you know what you're doing and explicitly want to hear the track multiple times.
Note, however, that if a track was recently played in a scheduled or interval playlist, and it also appears in a randomized general rotation playlist, the general rotation playlist will treat it as "recently played" and avoid repeating it.
If you don't have 6 hours' worth of tracks in your active general rotation playlist(s), the manager will of course be forced to duplicate some tracks within that period. In this case, the manager will wait as long as possible before repeating the track.
the manager will always give your playlist weighting requirements priority over this limit. So if you setup a pop track on a power rotation, the manager will honor your weighting requirements and play the pop track as often as your weighting requires, even if it means repeating the track multiple times within a 6-hour period.
Even in the above case, however, the manager will still try to do its best to keep tracks from repeating often; i.e., if your power rotation playlist has a number of other tracks in it, the manager will exhaust all of those other tracks before repeating the pop track.
Note: we changed the default time from 6 to 9 hours.
