Shuffling all files on the player (without a playlist)

[usernamenumber]

I'm sorry if this is a dummy or obvious question, I really did search around here and in the manual  before posting.

My iAudio X5's default firmware (and my iRiver H400's before that) has a feature for putting the whole player on shuffle. I've looked around and I cannot find an equivalent on Rockbox. The closest thing I can find is creating a playlist with every song on the player in it and shuffling that, but aside from that being a maintenance nightmare, I have more tracks on my player than will fit in a playlist (the whole reason I moved to Rockbox is that I'd passed the 10k limit of what Cowon's firmware supports).

Sooo... am I missing something? Is there an easy way to just say "play any music file you can find in random order"?

[Domonoky]

There are many different ways to achieve this.

One is the one you mentioned generated a m3u files of all files and play it.

Another way is to enable "recursive insert" and use "insert shuffle" on your music folder, so you get a dynamic playlist of all files in this folder and its sub-folders playing in shuffle.

A third way might be with the database.

Take a look at the manual :-)

[AlexP]

I have more tracks on my player than will fit in a playlist (the whole reason I moved to Rockbox is that I'd passed the 10k limit of what Cowon's firmware supports).

You need to increase the max playlist size option.

[usernamenumber]

@domonoky I did read (or at least search) the manual, and the problem with creating a dynamic playlist is, as I said in my post, that the number of tracks exceeded the max allowed in a playlist. The database has yet to initialize for me without failure, probably because Rockbox seems to have issues with .ogg files that have ID3 tags (the default used by my CD ripping software). If I can find a way to convert ID3 tags to ogg comments, maybe it will become an option for me.

@alexp Thanks! I can now create a playlist with all my music on it. It takes about two minutes to build, though, and has to be re-built whenever I add new music, so a true shuffle feature would still be nice.  /me makes a note to check the applications list for something that does this.

Anyway, thanks for the responses!

[torne]

*Everything* in rockbox is a playlist, whether you load something from a m3u, from a directory, or from a database category, so the playlist limit *always* applies. There is no other way to play anything in rockbox.