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(scared in case in wrong forum but) general info sought

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timh:
hi, I have known of rockbox for over a year now but am still unsure as to whether it can do this... so have decided to join and ask.  Be kind to this newbie !

I want to buy a player which has a single control button (or 2 buttons) offering this feature :

"shuffle all tracks"

and when pressed to shuffle all tracks, offers the option (or the 2nd button does) :

"play more tracks from this artist"

This way, you can listen to music at random, then when you find yourself listening to a song you're 'in the mood for', you can quickly listen to more of the same, before going back to random shuffle mode.   Its an obvious 'good idea' isn't it ?

Now so far I have seen several players which offer 'shuffle' and 'sequential' play, but to my knowledge, none offer a dedicated "play more from this artist" button.  As I mostly listen to my music in the car, the advantage of separate buttons to do this is obvious - you can't look at the player whilst driving, so if you know where the buttons are its easy to press the right one.     The old pjb100 was brilliant for this, and is still my player of choice in the car, but it doesnt offer the "play more from this artist" button !!!    

Nor does my iriver H140.    I quite fancied the cowon A2 as it seems to have programmable buttons, but does anyone know if it can do this - with or without Rockbox ?

hope someone here can point me in the right direction. preferably with more than 2-fingers!

tim

tucoz:
Hi, and welcome to Rockbox.

Shuffle in Rockbox is done by generating a playlist of the wanted tracks you want shuffled. That could be your entire collection if you want. Then you select shuffle playlist from a menu (no keys are wired to this funtion). When you then start playing tracks from the playlist you will get them in shuffled order.
There is not (as far as I know) a function to play more from this artist. A solution to this would be to have the option "Follow playlist" turned on, which means that the file browser is keeping track of where in the file tree the current track is. So, if you find a track you like and want to hear more from that artist (given that you order your artists in different sub-directories), when you then stop playback or enter the filebrowser, you will be where the artist resides. If you then select to simply play an track or folder, all subfolders will be added to a new playlist which it will start playing.
However, this is no ideal situation for in-car use. I am not sure, but maybe the tag database playback (aka TagCache) will have something like you are looking for.
In any case, the source is open so you could probably make this change with more or less effort in case you know C.

Hope this helped you

Martin

Febs:
If you are using Tag Cache, it takes 3 button presses from the browser to shuffle all tracks:

Select to select "Artist"
Select to select "All Tracks"
Select to select the first track to play.

This assumes that you have shuffle turned on.  If not, you need two additional keystrokes to turn on shuffle:

Long press of the menu button ("Menu" on iPods, "A-B" on iriver H100, H300, etc.)
Left arrow to turn on shuffle.

blackthunder:
I would really like a play more from this artist type feature as well.  I can get that to work using the file browser, but not using ID3 tags.  Is there a way to do this using tags? It always just goes back to the current playlist.

I enjoy selecting large groups of music by genre or year or whatever, and would like to be able to go easily to more of the currently playing artist. As it stands I have to go through the menu's and select the artist, or switch to filebrowser mode from id3 mode after playlist is created.

timh:
thanks for the replies so far, but wow! complicated or what!

as it happens, I do not know C or any of its variants, (but I do know some basic, and the logic must be pretty similar, and based on simply maintaining indexes of the relevant tags)

Hopefully, a developer here, or someone from Cowon, or Iriver or one of those nice Korean companies may pick up this thread and think "what a good idea" and do something about it.

No one has answered regarding the Cowon A2 programming, but it seems to me that the buttons A,B,C might be programmable.  This would give us (someone!) the chance to program buttons to offer  "more from this artist" "more from this genre" "more from this year" etc etc  based on the id3 tags.  I would actually be prepared to buy a player that could do this to help test if necessary, as it is by far the most important choice I make when I listen to music.

tim

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