Is it just me...

[jsbowden]

I have 310 albums, quite a few of which are multi disc, and yet, iTunes only seems to cycle through about 30 discs if I leave it on repeat all.

Really, is it so hard to ask that it never play a song again until it has gone through every other song available?

Oh, and remember where you were so you don't START OVER every time I have to restart.

I really don't think I'm asking much. The logic here isn't terribly difficult, but Apple don't seem to grasp it.

Shuffle everything, repeat all of it, nothing gets played more than once until the entire library has been cycled through, and remember where you left off between sessions.

In a program the size of iTunes, there's no reason why it can't do this.

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

In a program the size of iTunes, there's no reason why it can't do this.

Of COURSE there is! Apple's designers didn't think you might want to do that, so it's impossible!

(You can get close: Create a smart playlist, that live updates, where the criteria is "play count = 0". Play that playlist on shuffle. When it runs out, edit the criteria to be "play count =1". Repeat)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Apple goes out of their way to make using their software difficult. That's why you can't filter your iTunes collection on the basis of anything except genre, artist, album, or "duplicates". Letting you *filter* on other fields, instead of just *sorting* by other fields, would imply that you could do something using a built=in function in a way that Apple's own programmers never wanted to personally do themselves. And that's not just not allowed, it's actively prohibited.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I know, I've ranted on how Apple's 'Think Different' campaign really means 'Think Different our way'.

[publius1.livejournal.com]

You don't actually think that programmers dictate functionality, do you? hahahahahaaha

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"designers", then.

The point is, if they don't think you should want to do it, they not only don't support it but they put barriers in the way so you can't. It's the Apple way!

[publius1.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I'm just letting The Bitter run my day, aren't I?

[dscotton.livejournal.com]

Huh. I guess it depends on the company.

[publius1.livejournal.com]

Not really -- those companies that do have the programmers driving are the outliers.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Yes, because manually doing this shit is EXACTLY why we invented computers.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Apple!

[orzelc.livejournal.com]

I think you can do this, just not in the Party Shuffle mode (where it does tend to latch onto a few songs for no clear reason and play them over and over). If you just start it playing in a particular playlist, and turn shuffle on, it'll go through the whole thing once, then stop.

We do this with the iPod all the time.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

But if you turn off the program, when you start it up again it will not remember what it has and has not played.

[orzelc.livejournal.com]

I get around that by never turning it off.

(That's mostly due to Windows, though, not anything Apple does or doesn't do...)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Every time you recharge your iPod, it forgets it's place in the current playlist as it resyncs.

[orzelc.livejournal.com]

I only connect it to the computer when I have new songs to add, in which case it needs to re-synch and update the playlists. I keep it charged up through a couple of different powered speaker things.

Honestly, I'm just not seeing this as a major failing in the program. I guess it would be annoying if you only use it to listen to operas, or ebooks, or something that consists of a whole bunch of tracks that need to be played in a particular order, but that doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Playing tracks in order is easy. If I turn off shuffle, it'll start with Absolute Garbage, track one, and just go until it gets to the last track of the last album in the library. Highlight a particular album, and it will only play that album, highlight a particular artist, and it will only play tracks by that artist, or highlight a genre, and it only plays out of that genre (this is in the minibrowser ).

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

If you set the "genre" to Podcast it will remember it's place in the song. You can also manually set "remember my place" in an individual track manually.

You can't, however, alter a *different* genre so that all tracks tagged with that genre have the "remember position" bit set as well. That would just be too useful!

I'm just not seeing this as a major failing in the program.

I'm not nearly as obsessive about "play all the tracks equally" as Jamie is. I just think that, given all the *other* options they have, this one really should have been a no-brainer to add.

Take filtering by different fields - it's a simple extension of the current functionality. All they would have had to do was add a switcher that let you *choose what fields to sort by* instead of picking three and being stuck with just those specific three.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

It's not about absolute equality. Hell, I'd just be happy with something approximating equality, but iTunes doesn't even come close. I have eleven and a half DAYS of music in my library. I hear the same 20 hours of it over and over. Programming absolute equality would be a simple and easy bit of logic to do though, which is why I'd figure it'd at least be an option.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Hell, "remember my place in this playlist" is a DEAD SIMPLE feature that would be great for audiobooks, operas, serieses of podcasts, and obsessive-compulsives alike!

[dscotton.livejournal.com]

My solution to that was just to create a smart playlist that included everything not played in the last seven days, and then set party shuffle to use that playlist. It's pretty lame that Apple makes you come up with these bizarre workarounds, but achieved 80% of what I wanted.

[paradoxicmotion.livejournal.com]

You can't, however, alter a *different* genre so that all tracks tagged with that genre have the "remember position" bit set as well. That would just be too useful!

Pick the genre in the browser so it's only displaying tracks from that genre. Select all. Set "remember position" to "yes."

Yes, you'll need to set that when you add tracks to that genre (or when you're plain old importing them), but so what? If you're changing the genre of a track, the "remember position" setting is right there while you're doing it.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

But then I have to remember which genres need that bit set as I'm assigning genres.

Just like I said below, it's possible to do what Jamie wants by setting up a Smart Playlist with "play count = n" as your sole criteria and then changing it every time the cycle runs. This, however, is a pain in the ass that really shouldn't need to be done.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I'm not even in party shuffle...just the main library. I've basically resorted to leaving shuffle on and repeat off. This sort of mostly solves my problem in that it will only go through every song once. It doesn't remember where it was though, so it will never get to the end since Apple's randomization algorithm is broken in such a way that it 'randomizes' the songs in such a fashion that they always play in the same order.

It's a shame all the other media players on the PC suck even more than iTunes.

[orzelc.livejournal.com]

I'm not even in party shuffle...just the main library. I've basically resorted to leaving shuffle on and repeat off. This sort of mostly solves my problem in that it will only go through every song once. It doesn't remember where it was though, so it will never get to the end since Apple's randomization algorithm is broken in such a way that it 'randomizes' the songs in such a fashion that they always play in the same order.

I'm not sure what that means.
I've never noticed it repeating the full order before, though I can't say I've made a very systematic attempt to document it. It seems to follow a different path every time I re-start it in a given playlist, though. Maybe it's a bug with the main library, that doesn't occur with playlists?

I usually use the "Party Shuffle" feature, as it makes it easier to keep track of what's played recently. Also, I've got 10,538 songs in the main library, many of which I have for specific purposes, and don't want to hear randomly.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Ten THOUSAND? And I thought the 3985 I have were overkill. Most of what's in my library I want to hear though. The few things I don't want to hear, I just uncheck and they don't get played.

As for the randomization, maybe it branches a bit, but in general, it has about 5 - 10 discs it plays tracks out of at a time (and cycles new ones in as it runs out of tracks on the current list), and it seems to always start with the same song and use the discs in the same approximate order, so I feel like I'm always hearing the same tracks over and over. It definitely always starts with the same song.

[thormation.livejournal.com]

"And I thought the 3985 I have were overkill."

That's a lot of copies of one Men At Work song.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I like Men At Work. Do you come from the land down under?

[rgovrebo.livejournal.com]

Keep your eyes open for version 2 of Amarok - it'll have a Windows version.

It has both the Shuffle function you want, where you make a playlist of everything you want and it'll randomize it; and the Random function I prefer, where I don't necessarily have to wait for two weeks (literally - 4971 tracks at present) to hear a song again.

I haven't bothered with any other music players on Linux for years.

[mcswan.livejournal.com]

Then wait till you pick up the iPhone!

It won't even remember where you left off if you DON'T EVEN TURN THE DAMN THING OFF!!!

I download a podcast each week and have 20 mp3's where the first 20 or 30 characters of each and every mp3 is IDENTICAL, but if it's been several hours since I utilized the iPod capabilities, it will forget where I was and go back to "base," as if I had just synced. My podcasts are about 45 minutes a pop and that'll piss you right the hell off to not only forget where you were in a particular file, but forget which damn particular file you were on to begin with!

ARRRGH.

Not to mention, they have taken the (what I think) was the absolutely wonderful wheel function, and chucked it right the fuck out the window. Now we get a *tiny* scroll bar at the top of the album cover with which to scroll through the song. With the larger files, the "jump" of a drag can be up to 4 or 5 minutes. With the wheel, I could scroll to the second if I needed to listen to something again, or find my spot after a sync.

Frustrating to say the very least.

[mcswan.livejournal.com]

Me ranting about the names of the podcasts doesn't make any sense, because I forgot to come back and finish my thought...

The ticker crawl feature, where it would crawl through the entire file name?

GONE.

WTF, Apple? Seriously?

My file names are too long to see the important part at the end, namely the date and session. (4 sessions a day, 5 days a week) The file names as I see them on the iPhone:
Umptysquat Discussion Aug...
Umptysquat Discussion Aug...
Umptysquat Discussion Aug...
Umptysquat Discussion Aug...
Umptysquat Discussion Aug...
Umptysquat Discussion Aug...
Umptysquat Discussion Aug...
Umptysquat Discussion Aug...
Umptysquat Discussion Aug...
Umptysquat Discussion Aug...

It hurts.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

This won't be an issue, as the iPhone is only available on SBC Wireless (aka AT&T), who I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire, much less give money to.

SBC

[larabeaton.livejournal.com]

This acronym always confuses me.

"Seattle's Best Coffee? Since when are they a cell phone provider?"

Re: SBC

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

SBC is the baby bell that swallowed up a bunch of other baby bells and what was left of its original parent. SBC was Southwest Bell.

[dlganger.livejournal.com]

Heck, while we're wishing for impossible things, how about Apple creates a play logic API, so that third-party developers can create their *own* shuffle/play algorithms and plug them in?

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

I manage my ipod with smart playlists. You can convince them to do stuff, but you have to trick it. I am working on rating every song in my collection, which means, no repeats. I have a list that says give me songs with a rating of zero that have not been played in the last 10 days, or skipped in the last 20 days, sorted alphabeticly, limit to 25 songs. When I get on the bus, I rate songs from that list. If I skip the song without rating it, it won't come back for a long time. If I fall asleep and don't rate it, it still goes away for a while. I am making progress on the list.

My rating scheme is
5 stars= I like this song, regardless of genre preference
4 stars= I like this song, within it's genre
3 stars= I don't dislike this song enough to delete it.
2 stars= this song needs to have it's info edited.
1 star= delete this song from the collection.