Database Users

Music Player Shuffle?

Does anyone use the built-in music player to listen to random songs in their collection?
If so, how?
I have set Shuffle on. On going into the Music Player, I select 'All Songs', naturally it shows them all in Alphabetical order so by default it starts playing the first one and then I hit the forward arrow. It takes me another song, which is random in that it has nothing to do with the first song and is not the second one in alphabetical order, but it is always the same one. The next song after that is again unrelated to the first two, but is also always the same. Basically the shuffle option is almost always the same. That's not what I call Shuffle.
Anyone any ideas?

I'm having the same problem and I'm amazed no one else have been posting about this or have they? Will keep on looking in the forums but if you read this and know something, please reply to this call for help
Edit: Been looking through the search results for "Shuffle" and no success, there isn't a mention of it in the wiki either.
Edit#2: Edited the wiki to make it reflect the status of the problem.

I have always found this with HTC Audio Manager but it took me a long time to realise. It would get stuck on artists beginning with "B" then sometimes it might venture to "C" occassionally "T" but then always back to "B". Often it would stay stuck on one album and play two or three tracks even though it was set to shuffle.
It is not until you use another music player that you realise that you have not been listening to hundreds of songs in your library.
I give up with anything to do with HTC Audio Manager and I think it is easy to get attracted by the eye candy of it but frankly it does not work well at all. Shuffle is just one of many problems.
The shuffle and sound quality on Core Player is highly recommended.

custardo01 said:
The shuffle and sound quality on Core Player is highly recommended.
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I've succumbed and started to use Core Player, I am allthough looking forward to see this fixed in an official rom or maybe some touch diamond 2 rom..
Is the problem still there in Diamond 2?

tuomi said:
I've succumbed and started to use Core Player, I am allthough looking forward to see this fixed in an official rom or maybe some touch diamond 2 rom..
Is the problem still there in Diamond 2?
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I have been using WM6.5 for quite some time now but did try some ROMS with the new Manila from D2/Topaz a while back and I seem to remember it worked much better with shuffle.

[PROBLEM] HTC MP3 player stops after every song?

Hi there!
I've a huge problem with the music player on the hd2. It stops after EVERY song. I alsways have to turn on the phone and manually hit play or next to play the next sond. That's quite annoying!
It doesn't matter if I select an album, a playlist or whatver. Even if I turn on repeat-mode, the sond is only played once.
Anyone else have this problem? Is there a solution?

I noticed the same thing, and I already updated to 1.48...
There's a partial solution anyway: if you don't press the power off button to activate the stand by mode, but instead if you let stand by mode to activate by itself, it works correctly.

Tyrion84 said:
I noticed the same thing, and I already updated to 1.48...
There's a partial solution anyway: if you don't press the power off button to activate the stand by mode, but instead if you let stand by mode to activate by itself, it works correctly.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've had the same thing happen when I let standby mode activate itself, also have an issue where the MP3s stutter, small 1 second breaks in the music.

Few people use the embedded mp3 player coz it's bad and very slow, especially when you have a massive library.
You should try another player: Kinoma (freeplay is free), CorePlayer, Nitrogen (free), etc...

err, starting an extra application for that doesn't sound very attractive to me. Actually I like the fact that this is integrated into sense.
Regarding the speed: I've ~10 GB of music. The HTC player handles them very well

After i read this, i tested it on my device.
The first time the player stopes after the first track,
but if you press play again and you come to the end, then it switch to the next track without a problem and play it.
regards

I have the repeat button on and it doesnt' stop!! And the built in mp3 player is better than WMP because it actually shows chinese characters properly for me... And the interface looks nice...

I noticed the music player in htc sense only looks at the music folder on the storage card, is there any way to add more folders of music or must I insert all my music there and it will automatically be "synced" every time a new song/folder of songs is added?

On mine, the HTC music player looks for all audio files on both the storage card and the phone itself (anywhere in 'My Documents'). It even picks up ring tones I've added and the 'sample' music on the phone. So, I'm not sure if this is a setting of some kind, but mine seems to do what you want, and your's seems to do what I want.

same as you
I have the exactly same problem my friend nd it's irritating. For now, the only solution I have is the use of bluethoot earphones where I can skip the music on it, but as soon as I put classic earphones it does the same problem. I'm gonna try another player I think. it's a pity because HTC player is starting to become gorgeous

track order
Has anyone noticed track order problems. I've started a thread on this. It's really doing my head in.

Same track order problem here. Posted it to HTC-support, they have no solution. Every other player doesn't have this problem.

Anoying Problems with Music Tab

I've got a few problems with the music tab wich I think is very anoying. I hope anyone knows a sollution for this.
First of all, Does anyone know if there's a way to get the alphabetic numbers on the music library? Scrolling all the way down takes me al lot of time since I've got around 1000 songs.
My second problem, is there a fix for the shuffle butten in the music tab. Even when shuffle is on I still get at least 3 songs in alphabetic order every time I start my music tab. Also when I'm choosing a new song I always have to press the shuffle 2 times to let it work properly.
My last problem, I've got this game Flight Commander, wich is a great game. But it has some anoying sounds(.wav files) wich show up in my library. How can I let my music tab ignore these sounds without deleting them?
Ow and I also have this problem of my headphones. Do your devices also work slower if you put in your headphones?
Thanks, Sorry for my English, It's not perfect.

Try Nitrogen? It's superior to MW and music tab in every way.

Volw said:
Try Nitrogen? It's superior to MW and music tab in every way.
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Thanks for the reply and sollution, but I actually do like the music tab very much I think it looks very nice and I use it every day. So I was hoping for a sollution without changing my music player. But I will still keep it in mind. Thanks

I'm facing the same issues as well, as I use the default Music player to play all my song files instead of creating individual playlist. I tend to notice that the shuffle function tends to play a few 'favorite' songs of it's choice. Either that or the shuffle function stops working unless I reactive it back
I think the bug is triggered by having too much songs on your current playlists (mine being 6-7gb)

same here shuffle starts with couple of the same songs every time.
then letter repeat thingy.
I would really like to replace the music tab with someone else.
I wish applications inside tabs can be replaced easily!

So I guess there's still no solution for this?

Workaround
I have the same problem. I'm sick to death of hearing songs that start with 'A' - have forgotten all my songs that start from C onwards unless I drive to China. Only workaround I've found is go to library>all songs (rather than playlist) and pick a song, music player will restart and shuffle the full alphabet. I've also put a bug report into HTC on this maybe more of you could do the same.

Yes everything you listed as an issue has been started in two other threads, quite a few of us are waiting for a solution as I personally like the Sense music type, it's aesthetically pleasing and does what I want it to do.
Regarding the scrollbar the going consensus is that it can't just be made or migrated from another app like the contacts function. Something like that may have to come from HTC.
The shuffle button does this for me too, no matter what song I start the shuffle from it plays the same rotation of songs in the first ten I skip to. Then I notice an actual variety, also I find that after a soft reset it sometimes forgets that the shuffle is on and I have to turn it off and on again to get a shuffle.
There is no way to make the music player only look at certain folders, you can do it with the pictures tab by adding the unwanted folders as .reg entries but the music tab looks at all sounds.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but these fixes will more than likely have to come from HTC, they bill this phone as an entertainment phone (at least TMOUS version) and they include a great looking music player but dont assume that people will actually use it to play their large music lirbraries.
Playing all my sounds and the issue with shuffle are minor inconveniences to me, my biggest wish is a scrollbar.
*Edit, another issue I just remembered, when you are on a song and hit the library button it places you at the beginning, why can't it place you at the currently playing song. If I'm listening to a song starting with T and want to skip to a W I have to scroll from the beginning, utter nonsense
Oh well hopefully HTC gets with the program as I have not found a 3rd party music player that I like as much as the Sense player.

im having the problem where the song "blacks out" for a few seconds a couple times during songs where there is just no sound but the music is still going. also just got an issue where if i turn the screen off while headphones are plugged in it pauses the music. used to work so well...

HD2 Music player questions, suggestions needed.

Okay, so now that I'm committed to the HD2, I'm also committing to fix or remedy the issues I have with the device. I've gotten it to run smoothly, except for the Sense music player.
First, is it normal for it to scan for music every time it's powered on, or unplugged from USB? You would think it would save an "image" of your library to run off while it scans the SD card for new files, but no. Instead, it scans for several minutes, in which time it won't display any artists or albums and lags horribly. Am I missing a setting, or have my library sorted incorrectly? Right now it's setup as root/music/artist/album/mp3, fwiw.
Also, the gap between tracks is terribly annoying. It totally kills mix cd's that are cut into tracks, and ruins the flow of a lot of albums. Is there a way to get rid of this, like the "skip silence" function in iTunes? I knowIf not, is there an app that scans and removes silence from the beginning/end of my mp3's as a batch process? For example, point the app to my music folder, and let it scan/trim silence from each mp3 automatically?
Other than these problems, I really like the music player... but these things are serious dealbreakers for me. If there's no way around them, is there a music player you can suggest that does these things?
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. I really don't think these things are a lot to ask from a music player, and I'm hoping there's a way to make it happen.

+1 i too has this same issue

Yes, this happens. People have suggested a music player called nitrogen, but I haven't really messed with it to know how good it is or not.

Yes the HTC Sense music player can be one of the problems with this phone, especially for larger music collections, and/or ones stored on the card....mostly due to the less-than-efficient way it indexes the music. The two cabs I have attached should help you with that somewhat. The first one adds indexing to the startup group, so it should be pre-indexed by the time you decide to open the music tab. The second one turns on caching on the card, which should also help speed up the indexing and access times on the music tab.
As for the gaps between tracks, I've never seen a solution for that other than manually trimming the files...but even that won't totally remove the gap. I listen to a lot of full-length mix CD's too and the way I get around this issue is to just rip the CD as one full-length mp3, instead of as individual tracks. EAC (Exact Audio Copy) is the free utility I use for that

sirphunkee said:
Yes the HTC Sense music player can be one of the problems with this phone, especially for larger music collections, and/or ones stored on the card....mostly due to the less-than-efficient way it indexes the music. The two cabs I have attached should help you with that somewhat. The first one adds indexing to the startup group, so it should be pre-indexed by the time you decide to open the music tab. The second one turns on caching on the card, which should also help speed up the indexing and access times on the music tab.
As for the gaps between tracks, I've never seen a solution for that other than manually trimming the files...but even that won't totally remove the gap. I listen to a lot of full-length mix CD's too and the way I get around this issue is to just rip the CD as one full-length mp3, instead of as individual tracks. EAC (Exact Audio Copy) is the free utility I use for that
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Click to collapse
Hey, thanks for the help!
I have several mixes ripped as a single track, but it's hardly convenient. I just hope HTC is aware of this, and working on a solution for an upcoming ROM release. I definitely won't be holding my breath, though.

I've tried a bunch of different music players and the only one I have found that doesn't have the silences in between the songs is Pocket Player. Its a paid music player but if you have a large music library or listen to music a lot its by far the best solution out there.

speoples20 said:
I've tried a bunch of different music players and the only one I have found that doesn't have the silences in between the songs is Pocket Player. Its a paid music player but if you have a large music library or listen to music a lot its by far the best solution out there.
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I actually tried that out last night, v4.1, and I found it really clunky, with poor sound quality compared to the stock music player. Maybe I don't have the latest version, but I really didn't like it much.
Is there any other music players that have an interface similar to stock? Even if it doesn't have gapless playback, it's more likely that a dev would update the app more frequently than HTC.

gilla409 said:
I actually tried that out last night, v4.1, and I found it really clunky, with poor sound quality compared to the stock music player. Maybe I don't have the latest version, but I really didn't like it much.
Is there any other music players that have an interface similar to stock? Even if it doesn't have gapless playback, it's more likely that a dev would update the app more frequently than HTC.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Next try nitrogen and TCPMP

HTC Music Player's shuffle not shuffly enough?

This is a minor problem but I don't know what to make of it.
HTC's Music Player seems to have a couple of "favourite" songs, albums or artists that get extremely disproportionate airplay when I shuffle a playlist.
Say I shuffle a genre that contains about 40 entire albums (400+ songs). There's this one album ('Sno Angel Like You by Howe Gelb, if you must know) with about 15 songs on it, and all of them typically get played within the first 20 songs of that shuffled list. And there's a couple of other individual songs that show up remarkably often as well.
I've observed this for some time now and the bias is too obvious to be a coincidence or a false impression. It's nothing big, but slightly annoying to get the same songs all the time -- kinda beats the concept of shuffling, doesn't it?
I know it's a long shot, but does anyone have a clue what's going on here? Or a solution?

I am soooo glad it is not just me that has noticed this!
It frustrates me immensely!
Would love to know if there is something that can be done to resolve this....

i get this too...it's a real PITA!: -)

same here....

Glad I'm not the only one as well! seems like Music Player's kinda biased, no?

Wish I could be of assistance to you and myself included... I want variety everytime I play my music, so lately what I've been doing is switching from shuffled to normal, so now I can remember what song will be played next in a shuffle which is pretty sad

Robrecht said:
This is a minor problem but I don't know what to make of it.
HTC's Music Player seems to have a couple of "favourite" songs, albums or artists that get extremely disproportionate airplay when I shuffle a playlist.
Say I shuffle a genre that contains about 40 entire albums (400+ songs). There's this one album ('Sno Angel Like You by Howe Gelb, if you must know) with about 15 songs on it, and all of them typically get played within the first 20 songs of that shuffled list. And there's a couple of other individual songs that show up remarkably often as well.
I've observed this for some time now and the bias is too obvious to be a coincidence or a false impression. It's nothing big, but slightly annoying to get the same songs all the time -- kinda beats the concept of shuffling, doesn't it?
I know it's a long shot, but does anyone have a clue what's going on here? Or a solution?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Agreed...samething here...its like it doesnt even shuffle it just skips a song lol...
Sent from my HTC HD2 using XDA App

Robrecht said:
This is a minor problem but I don't know what to make of it.
HTC's Music Player seems to have a couple of "favourite" songs, albums or artists that get extremely disproportionate airplay when I shuffle a playlist.
Say I shuffle a genre that contains about 40 entire albums (400+ songs). There's this one album ('Sno Angel Like You by Howe Gelb, if you must know) with about 15 songs on it, and all of them typically get played within the first 20 songs of that shuffled list. And there's a couple of other individual songs that show up remarkably often as well.
I've observed this for some time now and the bias is too obvious to be a coincidence or a false impression. It's nothing big, but slightly annoying to get the same songs all the time -- kinda beats the concept of shuffling, doesn't it?
I know it's a long shot, but does anyone have a clue what's going on here? Or a solution?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have noticed this issue on mine also and had the same issue on an iphone I had. probably has something to do with the algorithms used in the selection process. In any event, I noticed that when I created a playlist, enabled the shuffle and disabled the repeat function, it would play completely through the entire playlist once and then stop. Even after powering down, the next time I turned on the phone and went to the music player, it would be where it left off and continued til it went through the entire playlist. I am currently trying it on the entire library (700+ songs) and seems to be working so far. The only problem is trying to remember if a song has already played or not after 4 or 5 days in to it. But I think as long as you don't touch anything other than advancing going back to a previous song it seems to work, but I wish I had a better way to keep track!

i was so glad when i saw this, i know its not just me experiencing it!
does anyone know how the music is shuffled? i would have assumed its by track name, it could be by file name or info in the ID3 tags or some other source or a combination? maybe this affects it somehow
my solution is to turn shuffle off then turn it on again, it works for a bit then has to be done again. i also have repeat all enabled. im tempted to actually start syncing music with windows media player on my pc, maybe i could then create a playlist of all the songs shuffled then just copy that over every now and then.
it does seem more then coincidence that the same songs get played a lot. ive noticed if i have similar song names they are played close together. for example, i have a song called americas suitehearts (by fall out boy) and 2 versions of american idiot by green day (1 live and 1 normal). guarenteed every time these three songs will play one after the other (2 american idiot songs, then americas suitehearts) very strange. i know HTC released an update to correct some bugs in the music player, but i have no idea what was fixed.

Definately a bit of a problem, seems to jump from bottom of the list to the top then back to the bottom etc when selecting songs not actual random.
Would love a fix for this

is there any other player that supports the remote and does the shuffle as it should?

I'm also experiencing this problem. Even tried some different roms to see if this would help, but to no avail.
Is there another music player that is easily integrated into a tab ?

Woa, lots of replies! Thanks... good to hear I'm not the only one (or crazy).
Yeah, it's annoying. I haven't done any more testing but I've been thinking about this. I believe the Music Player shuffles the whole playlist the moment you tap the "shuffle" button. By this I mean that it decides beforehand in which random (but not random enough) order it will play the songs, instead of randomly choosing the next song each time the previous song ends.
Not much news there, right?
Now, I like to shuffle playlists containing lots and lots of songs, much more songs than I could ever listen to in one sitting, because I want to be "surprised" by what comes up. Unfortunately, as we have all experienced, the same songs seem to be put at the beginning of the shuffled list every time, so I end up hearing those songs over and over again.
But of course the rest of the shuffled list still contains all the other songs you put in it. This would mean that, if you're tired of hearing the same songs all the time, you could simply make a habit of skipping the first, say, 20 songs (the ones that always come up in the beginning) to get to the less familiar ones. Could be a workaround, I don't know.
Then there's still the problem that the player seems to like grouping songs from the same album together. Ideally, I think a good shuffle function should actively avoid playing songs from the same album/artist in a row (even preventing them from ending up together purely by chance; i.e., a good shuffler should go beyond simply randomising). But HTC's shuffler seems to actively pursue it: it shows more album grouping than can be explained by mere coincidence.
All very strange. :-/

Robrecht said:
Woa, lots of replies! Thanks... good to hear I'm not the only one (or crazy).
Yeah, it's annoying. I haven't done any more testing but I've been thinking about this. I believe the Music Player shuffles the whole playlist the moment you tap the "shuffle" button. By this I mean that it decides beforehand in which random (but not random enough) order it will play the songs, instead of randomly choosing the next song each time the previous song ends.
Not much news there, right?
Now, I like to shuffle playlists containing lots and lots of songs, much more songs than I could ever listen to in one sitting, because I want to be "surprised" by what comes up. Unfortunately, as we have all experienced, the same songs seem to be put at the beginning of the shuffled list every time, so I end up hearing those songs over and over again.
But of course the rest of the shuffled list still contains all the other songs you put in it. This would mean that, if you're tired of hearing the same songs all the time, you could simply make a habit of skipping the first, say, 20 songs (the ones that always come up in the beginning) to get to the less familiar ones. Could be a workaround, I don't know.
Then there's still the problem that the player seems to like grouping songs from the same album together. Ideally, I think a good shuffle function should actively avoid playing songs from the same album/artist in a row (even preventing them from ending up together purely by chance; i.e., a good shuffler should go beyond simply randomising). But HTC's shuffler seems to actively pursue it: it shows more album grouping than can be explained by mere coincidence.
All very strange. :-/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'l try this again, choose shuffle, disable Continue function. it'll play all the way through without repeating as long as you leave it alone. If you're constantly changing playlists or going in and out of the library, then it starts all over again. I have mine set like this and haven't repeated once since I set it. Player will stop completely once you go through the selected library, playlist, etc.

same problem here. the bias seems to be towards songs in the beginning of the list, so songs starting with a number or with an a have a bigger chance of being selected. the only way of changing the songs being played is adding an empty song entitled "111", which will result in other songs being randomly picked (i.e. the songs just before the ones that would normally have been selected in the alphabetical list).

hi
Please include me also i have also same problem htc hd2 shuffle is not working properly

Glad I'm not just being too picky. I tried using Kinoma FreePlay, which shuffles nicely but does a lot of quick pauses in playback when the device is locked. Found that Windows Media Player shuffles well once it S-L-O-W-L-Y loads all the files into its library, but it won't stop playing the podcasts and other misc. audio files in folders that I've made hidden. Anyone know a good freeware alternative to the HTC player?

Gyaaaa, someone have to let them know (HTC) about this. Glad I'm not the only one experiencing this.

Ive had my HD2 a few weeks and I thought I'd noticed the same think. I play all the tracks in shuffle mode but i noticed that after a soft reset the player would tend to revert to playing the tracks in alphabetical order. I only spotted this when it played the same track in a row (with different artists) and when some tracks kept cropping up (those with names starting with A!) I also noticed that the shuffle function was switching off (although at least once Ive had to switch it off and back on to get it to shuffle again).
I also think its done this when connecting to my pc in hard drive mode (songs are on SD card so perhaps player is resetting track listing) and possibly when switching from and to bluetooth (which i do several times a day). It doesnt always start from "A" either, sometimes it just plays in alphabetical order from where the play list left off.
Never had this problem on my HD.
Not suggesting this is what is happening to others, although seems to fit with a more experiences others are having. Not obvious to spot when tracks are playing in alphabetical order as you dont always think of the track titles!

Can we somehow fix that problem. It really annoys me