play all songs randomly

[parafux]

Hi,

i am quite new in Rockbox and honestly dont know how to play more songs than only from one album or one artist.
I have an ipod with 512 GB and 6000 songs on it. I want to play them all randomly.
All files are located in a directory structure like
A
- Artist A
  - Album A
  - Album B
- Artist B
...
B
- Artist B
  - Album A
...
I dont know how to create this playlist, that i need, easily.
All intuitive things i tried did not work, and the docu does not help a lot for me.

hope anyone can help easily.

best regards
p.

[bluebrother]

May I suggest checking the fine manual? https://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/rockbox-ipod6g/rockbox-buildch4.html#x7-650004.4

[parafux]

Hi and thanks for the advice, but that is exactly the problem, i dont know how to create a playlist, i dont see any menu item, the only to create one opens up a large keyboard, with no option to create the playlist finally.
And also i dont know to add all my files recursively through all subfolders to that playlist, randomly.

Hope there is a way simply to play all songs that are located in a directory recursivly with all subfolders randomly.

[cela]

Not sure if its right for you, but in the past I've found this plugin useful.
https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/PluginRandomFolderAdvanceConfig

[Serenity]

The conceit with Rockbox is that it always plays a playlist. Select a song to play, and Rockbox will create a playlist that contains everything in that subfolder and play it. Choose a song from a different album, Rockbox will toss out the current playlist and create a new one with the new album.

If there is no currently playing song, navigate to the first item you want to add to a new playlist, highlight it, long-press the centre button and choose "Current Playlist" and then "Insert". After that, keep adding individual tracks the same way. When you are happy, you can go to the Playlist menu and "Save Current Playlist".

The alphabet screen only appears when you choose to save the currently playlist. So, instead of creating a playlist file to add tracks to, you build your playlist by adding tracks to the currently playing list, and then save it when you're ready.

Now, to shuffle all the tracks on the iPod, the easiest way to do that would be to move all your music into a master "Music" folder. That way, with the iPod stopped, you are able to navigate to the "Music" folder, long-press the centre button, choose "Current Playlist" and then choose "Insert Shuffled". I've done this with my own iPod. To make the "Music" folder less intrusive, you can navigate to it, long-press the centre button, and choose "Start File Browser Here".

As an alternative, my wife has a portable installation of Foobar2000 in a dedicated folder in her Rockbox player. She connects the player to her computer, starts Foobar, and all her playlists are there for her to manage on her PC. If you do not want a master music folder, this would be the next easiest. Also, easier to title playlists--just remember to change the save format to .M3U or .M3U8 instead of Foobar's default .FPL.

[bluebrother]

See in the context menu of the "Playlist Catalogue" entry in the main menu. Seems this has been changed but the manual still reflects the old entry. Though it's usually not too hard to find such things (I simply tried )

[philden]

Note that your ability to shuffle all songs is limited by the maximum capacity of your playlists. There is a setting for this, but the maximum allowed value is 32,000. So if you have more than 32,000 songs, you won't be able to shuffle them all.

[Telehubis]

There is also this thing you can try. It worked for me.

https://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=52297.0

[Countryman]

Why not using an external program to create & manage playlists on the iPod?
I am using WinAmp and listFix() with great success.

[philden]

There seem to be many approaches to this issue, and some don't work if your library contains more than 32,000 songs. My objective is not to make a random playlist of all of the songs, but to make a random selection from the full library. So I have my playlist limit set to 2,000 although my library currently contains about 65,000 tracks.

Database --> Track
long select
Current Playlist --> Insert Shuffled

Seems to work the way I desire, and is fairly quick.

[philden]

Responding to my previous post. After more experimentation, I don't think it is possible to create a totally random playlist from a library that is larger than the maximum playlist size.

The logic is that every mode for selecting tracks involves making the playlist and then using 'insert' or 'insert shuffled'. For a fully random selection from all tracks, there would need to be an option under 'Tracks' to select randomly until the currently set playlist length was filled.
Currently we can only select a single random artist or a single random album.

Unless I am missing something, of course!

[philden]

For completeness I'm reposting here. The solution lies in https://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,53990.0.html and requires increasing the maximum playlist size using the 'fixed.cfg' file.