The "listen at will" feature always chooses the same songs (from online and offline sources), "play all music" in music library or choosing a track and then go to shuffle mode, only uses a small part of the library. It seems that it is not possible to use "shuffle" with the whole library. Is implementing a real shuffle mode rocket science?
That's exactly my biggest problem with my A6. I have a playlist on Tidal with almost 1400 tracks and the shuffle function is really useless unless it'll read the whole list of songs first.
I have made the same comment repeatedly since getting the device. I listen almost exclusively to music on the SSD and a "shuffle" playlist only draws from like 10% of the music available One other annoying thing about shuffle play: you can see a list of the songs you just heard but not the songs upcoming on the playlist. This is backwards! I can't imagine why I would want the former and really miss the latter. I exchanged emails with mindy@zidoo.tv who told me that R&D was looking into improvements but I have seen no related update. My last exchange with her was in January and I will follow up again. I would recommend adding your voice to mine by emailing her as well. She has been very responsive.
The player is oriented to play albums not big playlists. The same reason why these take long time to start playing. A top2000 folder may take 2 minutes.
With all the due respect... a playlist with more than 100 songs (like, 400 minutes? kinda 7 hours playback...?) is, IMO, a silly thing; to begin with, you ARE OUGHT to play it shuffled, as otherwise your available time would always allow for a couple of hours, and this makes very looooong playlist useless. Yes, I know, it's a nice thing if you can shuffle your entire library. To shuffle mine would be silly for one reason more: I have a few different genres, and having Dave Brubeck be followed by Rage Against The Machine is not properly what I may be into... As I said, no offense, just my view.
I own an Eversolo DMP-A6, a Bluesound Node and an Auralic Aries S1. The Bluesound Node can instantly start playing a playlist of up to 9999 tracks in completely random order. The Auralic Aries S1 has a play queue limit of 999 tracks, but has the option to pick 999 random songs from your entire library and start playing them immediately. However, in both cases below, shuffle playback may not be what you expect. When you play a preset playlist on the Bluesound Node, it will start from the first song. When you select to play a playlist on the Auralic Aries S1, it will also start from the first song. In these cases, songs will be played randomly from the second song onwards, so it seems that the system starts playback without having to wait for the loading time.
Just to be clear - I don't want a shuffle function with playlists with 10.000+ songs that play for weeks, I only want a shuffle function with a working algorithm, that chooses songs from the whole library from a-z, without playing always the same songs. now it seems, that the DMP-A6 only chooses from the first 2000 songs, and some of the songs are always chosen every time i start "shuffle". A shuffle function that only choses songs only from the same 10% of the whole collection is useless
I have pointed this out before, but there has been no improvement. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are two additional issues with the limit on the maximum number of tracks in the play queue: 1. When adding all tracks of the specific genre of the library at once 2. When adding all tracks of the entire library at once In either case, only first 2000 tracks can be put into the play queue, so tracks exceeding this limit will be never played. At a minimum, if shuffle play is requested, the entire target tracks should be randomly reordered and after then the maximum number of tracks should be queued for playback. In this way, even if there is the limit number of play queue tracks, I can avoid that there will always be tracks never be played. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please set the maximum value of the play queue to 9999. | Zidoo forum
I still hope that the Eversolo R&D team can come up with a solution, because when customers purchase a high-capacity local music player, they naturally expect to be able to shuffle all their beloved songs. If this is technically unfeasible, please consider supporting a sideloaded app with comprehensive features that allows full-library shuffle playback, such as Pulsar+.
There is no mandatory relation between "having a huge library" and "expecting to be able to shuffle it"... Maybe this is what YOU expect. I don't; despite the fact that my library is huge.
I respect your point of view, but after all, this is a $750 USD device— not a cheap Android toy. It's understandable to have higher expectations for the A6, especially when even cheaper Android phones can instantly shuffle a large number of songs.
I have a 16 year old iPod Classic that can random shuffle play from a library of some 16,000+ songs. Seems strange a streamer with an internal microprocessor can't do the same. Not that shuffle play is a high priority for me.
It would be pretty easy to do a shuffle over all items in the database. The remote control I wrote can do it, and it is not even installed on the device. The code simply locates random positions in the database (based on the current filter) and puts the corresponding track in the playing cue. Windows Program to control DMP Streamer from Desktop - with local database (free, inofficial DIY) | Page 4 | Zidoo forum Edit: The latest edition can now optionally shuffle from all albums (=folders) which are at least mentioned once in a certain playlist (M3U file), excluding all other files.
That is precisely what I want. And I get your point: my library is similarly diverse, but I kind of dig the "now for something completely different" aspect. And I can always hit "next" if I am not ready for what shuffle serves up. If for some reason doing a shuffle play from the entire SSD is not possible (or not feasible) a second-best solution would be provide a button that would direct the machine to pull a new 2k song selection from the SSD.
It would be great if Eversolo replicated the "Random Mix" feature from Squeezebox LMS. I used this feature extensively during my many years of Squeezebox ownership. They key Squeezebox element, which made it so workable, was the ability to select Genres to include in Random Mix. From memory, Squeezebox also allowed you to play a random mix of songs, albums or artists. I mostly just used the songs option.
