How can I shuffle my entire library?

[tomreid]

Hi

I hope this is a simple problem to fix. I love the audio quality on Rockbox, but one of my favorite things to do on my old iPod was to just let it play any of the songs in any order, i.e. shuffle my entire library.

I'm running the latest version of Rockbox on a iPod Classic 5.5. I have around 10 000 songs in my library.

I can play songs individually no problem by just navigating to the relevant file.

I tried to enable the database, but it either takes ages to navigate to anything in the database when the database is not loaded to RAM, or when it's loaded to RAM it takes around 10 minutes after my iPod is switched on before it will do anything and this process seems to take half the battery.

I read somewhere that you need to add all your music files into one big playlist, then shuffle that, but when I try to do this it seems like it is adding all my songs into one playlist, but I only see one CD when I navigate to the playlist.

Can someone help me?

I am usually quite good at learning open source software, so my failure with Rockbox has left me a bit frustrated, but as I've converted a load of my CDs into ogg format and Apple Firmware won't play this format, I want to see if I can stick with Rockbox (the audio quality is beautiful too..

cheers

Tom.

ps if this is easily explained in any user guides on this website, please let me know where, I found the user guides pretty difficult to follow.

[Chronon]

What happens if you go to Playlists in the main menu and choose Create Playlist?

10 minutes sounds excessive.  It takes my gigabeat on the order of 15 seconds to scan the database into RAM.

[tomreid]

It seems to be adding all the songs, takes around 10 minutes. But then when I opt to view playlist I only see one album.

cheers

[Lear]

When you say "opt to view the playlist", it sounds like you're looking at the file browser, showing the currently playing folder. To view the playlist, you need to enter the WPS context menu, go to the playlist menu, and select view playlist.

As for the slow start, first check if the dircache is enabled, as that should speed things up. You can also try disabling database auto update (but try enabling dircache first).

[amishfury]

i use playlist creator 3

under settings...
in file types i have all the extensions for the various audio formats set
in mp3 make sure get data from id3 tags is unchecked as it's not needed
in playlist details under saving playlist entries use "Absolute, without drive" and check the box to use forward slashes

add the folder all the music on your player is stored in (with the add folder recursively box checked) for me it takes maybe 20 seconds for the 700 songs currently on my player

set a name and location (i personally prefer the root directory for quick and easy access) save it as .m3u

load the playlist and turn on the shuffle mode

rebuild the playlist each time you add or remove songs from the player

i find it to be much quicker and easier than using the built in playlist editing feature