I won’t make this note a typical rant but it do want to express my disappointment.
After well over a year of frustration, I’m dumping my WDTV on eBay and replacing it with a better player.
About 3 years ago I purchased a WDTV (the original) to replace a defective 100 capacity CD player. One of the main purposes of both devices was to play background music. This was usually a shuffle of one particular genre. Both the CD player and then the original WDTV worked well.
However, over a year ago, I replaced the original WDTV player with a WDTV Live in order to avoid moving the hard drive for necessary updates. That was a bad move since both the “play by genre” and shuffle features work poorly on the WDTV Live. The “play by genre” (and any other “play by”) feature ultimately took me to only one album. In effect, it was just like a manual search for one CD to play in a single CD player.
In order to overcome this limitation, I moved all music files of one genre into one file folder and played that folder on a shuffle. That played songs from more then one album but the shuffle continually repeated a limited number of songs from that folder (I have about 2000 songs in the folder).
I originally reported the problem to WD tech support but was advised that the problem was a hardware issue and couldn’t be changed. (a rather poor and incorrect answer since it worked well on the original WDTV).
The issues were posted in the “Ideas forum” by me and others:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Live-Live-Plus-Ideas/Music-playback-by-genre-amp-artist/idi-p/19552
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Live-Live-Plus-Ideas/Play-all-from-genre-artist-etc/idi-p/25490
However, since the problem was identified many software updates have been issued without a fix for these problems. Instead, these updates have fixed other issues and added, what in my opinion, are rather silly additional features. (eg. YouTube on the WDTV is a frustrating and useless feature).
I can’t understand this since a proper shuffle and the ability to play all songs in a genre is a fundamental feature of any media player.
Therefore, my patience has ended. The WDTV Live will shortly be history and will be replaced by a more suitable media player.
In addition, I’m a bit of a computer nerd. I’m in the business. In past, I have purchased and advised others to purchase WD products. I doubt that I’ll make similar purchases and recommendations in the future.
Good-bye Western Digital.