Database Users

HTC Music Shuffle

I am using the HTC music player in TF3D 2.5. It seems like the shuffle feature is not very good. I will have a play list with a few hundred songs in it. When I tell the player to shuffle, I tend to get multiple songs from the same artist/album played together. When it does shuffle in other songs, they tend to be from a similar position in the playlist. It seems like they couldn't effectively randomize throughout the entire list.
Has anyone else notice this? I know people have other 3rd party players they prefer. If I go that route, can the music tab in TF3D be updated to use those players instead?

i noticed that too...
thats why i'm not using it anymore.
i got "pocket music" cost me $30.00 but it was worthed
works perfect on tp2

hempel said:
I am using the HTC music player in TF3D 2.5. It seems like the shuffle feature is not very good. I will have a play list with a few hundred songs in it. When I tell the player to shuffle, I tend to get multiple songs from the same artist/album played together. When it does shuffle in other songs, they tend to be from a similar position in the playlist. It seems like they couldn't effectively randomize throughout the entire list.
Has anyone else notice this? I know people have other 3rd party players they prefer. If I go that route, can the music tab in TF3D be updated to use those players instead?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Computer random is random and you can get patterns where you'll see two songs next to each other on an album or playlist played right after each other.
Doesn't mean its "not random enough" it just means your perception of random may not be random enough
So i guess what you're asking for is something which doesn't play songs randomly, it applies some logic to the tracks to ensure you don't get two by the same artist next to each other or songs aren't all from the same album.

Highland3r said:
Computer random is random and you can get patterns where you'll see two songs next to each other on an album or playlist played right after each other.
Doesn't mean its "not random enough" it just means your perception of random may not be random enough
So i guess what you're asking for is something which doesn't play songs randomly, it applies some logic to the tracks to ensure you don't get two by the same artist next to each other or songs aren't all from the same album.
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Click to collapse
I would say that having 4-5 songs out of 6 from the same album is not random when there are several hundred songs to pick from.
To the perosn who switched to a different player, are you set the music tab in TF3D to use the new playerr? How does one go about doing that?
Thanks

I've been playing with music player from touchflo and s2p and the suffle option is different. The s2p works great but the music player from htc doesnt. I have all different artists and about 200 songs. I play music for about 30 minutes, i stop for a while and play music for another 30 minutes. The same songs play again in a different order, but the same songs!

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.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
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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Click to collapse
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.
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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. :-/
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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

Quirky Music Player on the Galaxy Note

I think the Note is a great device. I just could not fathom what the designers were thinking when they built the stock Music Player. It plays album tracks in alphabetical order, as opposed to the common track number order. I did not see any option in the UI to make it behave properly.
I am certain my MP3 with ID3 tags are fine. Because they played fine on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Galaxy S II. My workaround to this quirky behavior of the stock music player... use an alternate Music Player from the Market.

same problem
Yup...mine has the same issue...all songs in all the albums are arranged alphabetically.
And there is no option of changing it. This is my first android and did'nt expect these kinda bugs.
Even my last phone, N8, had songs arranged by track number. Its really frustrating.
Anyone got a fix or do we have to wait for an update from samsung.
Btw another thing i noticed was that while viewing the music list while playing the music in the background, the bar at the bottom displays "song name _ artist". Should'nt it be a '-' instead of a '_'.

I noticed the same issue with the stock music player and also couldn't find a work around. I have therefore now started using Winamp which does thankfully play them in track order.
Sent from my GT-N7000 using xda premium

So there's no other option but to use another music player.
And wait for samsung to fix this.

Slightly off topic, but this is one of the advantages of Android over iOS - if you don't like the stock application, you can simply use another!
I don't think I've used the stock music player for any Android device I own.
Regards,
Dave

Lol..ya dude...another way to look at it...
And which player do you suggest?

I went for "cubed" (or "3") from the market, mainly 'cos it looks really good - but it sounds good too once you tweak the EQ a bit (though I have found that it has a tendancy to lock up the player if you mess with the EQ settings too much on the graphical interface).
EDIT - I also found it to do a good job of sorting out the somewhat patchy album art I had on the 30GB library I'd copied over form my old N900 to my Note (once I discovered that to do this you hold and drag on the album to get to the art selection/download functionality). It doesn't have an auto mode to process all albums but the per-album manual method was quick & painless for those albums that required it.

Well the real problem that i saw after using the note is that in Artists view...the songs are arranged by track number...while in album view..they are arranged alphabetically....
The thing i wanna know is does 2.3.6 fix this or not...
Screen shots attached
Thanks

abirsharda said:
Well the real problem that i saw after using the note is that in Artists view...the songs are arranged by track number...while in album view..they are arranged alphabetically....
The thing i wanna know is does 2.3.6 fix this or not...
Screen shots attached
Thanks
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
nope, not fixed.
i just use poweramp. much more customisable.

Souai said:
nope, not fixed.
i just use poweramp. much more customisable.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Power amp was using to much the CPU 35-50% so installed and did go back to stock player and his 5-12% CPU usage.
Sent from my GT-N7000 using XDA App

The stock player sorts the track according the track numbers in the artist view.

Bobanovicz said:
The stock player sorts the track according the track numbers in the artist view.
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Click to collapse
Ya i know it does that in artist view...it would not be a problem if some albums had different artists...then we have to open album view and listen alphabetically which sucks...and as Braxos pointed out power amp is using too much cpu for playing music...i just did'nt expect these kinda bugs when we're buying expensive smartphones...

Winamp sorts the music properly.
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note.

MixZing is what I'm using, GREAT audio player which boasts a 10 band equalizer ranging from 30hz to 16khz, an amplifier to boost the volume, and yeah the songs/artists are alphabetically in order too!
I strongly recommend this application.

Efficient Music Player For The Note?
Coming from an iPhone which can boast music for 20 hours in a real life scenario... is there any decent music player that is power efficient? Poweramp looks like a battery hog that i'm not using for sure. Thanks
If anybody has run a music playback time test please report.