Support and General Use > Audio Playback, Database and Playlists

Any way I can get a multi-folder random without playlists?

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Nazo:
I'm trying out RockBox on my iAudio X5L and was kind of hoping that I could switch to it as overall it's probably the better choice.  However, one thing that is driving me absolutely insane is the way it won't handle multi-folder randomizing the same way as either of my other Cowon players (a U3 and D2) as it's the only one with RockBox.  The main problem is that it doesn't really seem to like changing directories.  If I enable auto-change directory it helps, but it still wants to play everything in the current directory first before moving on to another (and it seems like it goes in order even.)  With my D2 and U3, I can set to shuffle using the currenty directory, subdirectory, or to use all directories (which is the option I'm using.)

By everything I could find in the manual it seems I'm expected to always use a playlist to get a true randomization.  This is a problem for me because I like to manually select songs from time to time, so I would have to manually start up the playlist again every single time after I do this...  Since I can do this multiple times in just one session it's REALLY annoying.  Finding each song in the playlist is even worse though because I'm using folders to organize things the way I want it and in the playlist it's just all thrown together in a completely unorganized manner that makes finding anything a LOT harder...  Also, I was kind of hoping to replace my U3 with the X5L as my car MP3 player.  Needless to say, I don't need to be having to mess with buttons and digging through long lists to find something when I just want to select one particular song that I know the exact location and name of...  Right now I already have over 300 songs to choose from and that's just given the files off of my 2GB player.  Considering that the only single reason that I want to replace my U3 with this is because I found the U3's 2GB limitation to be a bit troublesome now (I'm getting surprised how long it took me to start actually finding this to be limiting though -- I've had this 2GB U3 since before they started making 4GB U3s) I would end up with even more music on there once I switched...

By all I can tell from the manual, it just really sounds like RockBox simply doesn't want to work this way.  Do I need to just give up and stick with the original firmware?

Llorean:
Try creating your random playlist, and using "queue next" when you want to hear a specific song, rather than trying to find it in the playlist...

Nazo:
So instead of one press once I've found the song I want I have to hold the button for a bit, hit right, hit down five times, then right again to add the song, then back out with left about four times, press down two times, and then finally press right twice to go to the track I wanted all the while with the player at a fair distance from myself such that I would have to focus more to see what I'm doing in all of this despite the fact that I would have to dedicate only a very small part of my attention to the player?  Remember, I want to use this in the car.  Also, won't this make the playlist become progressively less and less random over time as the songs I select the most end up in the list the most?  I want them to only come up more often when I select them more often, not in the normal random process.  I really don't want to have to keep regenerating the playlist every time I make file changes anyway and with this I'd have todo it even more often than that.  With the Cowon firmware on my D2 and U3 I don't have to do any of this stuff, just set it to use all folders and I'm done.  It seems to me that RockBox is meant to be better than stock firmwares though, so surely it can do this much without it having to be such a hassle?  There has to be a better way to do it that I'm just not figuring out yet.  Frankly I found it easier to use the D2 in the car than this would be even...

Chronon:
Rockbox allows more features.  We don't claim that every possible feature is accessible with a minimum of key presses. If flexibility isn't your thing, then it's possible that Rockbox isn't the best match for you.

The beauty of it is that since the source code is accessible, you could change the behavior if you wanted to.

GodEater:
Whether or not Rockbox is "better" than an original firmware depends entirely on who you are, and what your expectations are. For a lot of people Rockbox provides more features and works more how they want than the Original Firmware of a given player. For some people, it doesn't - that's just all there is to it.

While I agree that the number of button pushes you need to use to get what you want is more than a simple "click click done", it's not quite as many as you've made out.

I've just done it :

1) click select to get to file view.
2) navigate to song (variable number of clicks depending on your folder layout
3) long select
4) right
4) down four
4) right
6) play (return to WPS screen).

Still less than ideal - but a lot less than you've listed.

Note that the queue function does not alter your saved playlist, it puts the track into the list of songs that will be played in memory only, it doesn't change the one on disk.

All that being said, I'm not sure how you expect this to work any other way - how is one click going to get you to the song you want to hear next?

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