Shuffle picks same few songs from playlists

I have all of my music arranged in playlists on my hub. My playlist have about 300 songs in them. When playing the playlist in Shuffle mode, it seems to play the same few songs over and over.

Am I doing something wrong?

Is there anyway to make the Hub not keep picking the same few songs?

Thanks,

Jeff

I have noticed the same, both with music and photos.  SHUFFLE definitely does not do what I expected.  As example, I play photo slideshow on my entire collection, about 15000 pictures, and in shuffle mode, it will play the same group of about 50 pictures way more than anything else.  My photos are stored in folders, by year, by month.  

… Anyone? Is there a fix for this? I purchased this unit primarily to be a jukebox, if it can’t shuffle without playing the same songs over and over, it’s pretty much useless for me.

The only work around that I know is to make a shuffled playlist and then play that.

Thanks for the idea richUK. I’m not doing that though, what a pain. The shuffle feature just doesn’t work, it’s useless.

I have just noticed this problem tonight. After making a playlist for an event this evening and synching it over, I noticed it correctly showed 239 songs on it. However, I cannot actually see all 239 when I scroll through the list, as it only shows the first 60 or so over and over again. This isn’t right. When playing, it only repeats those same songs, and never moves deeper into the rest of the playlist.

I manually opened up the playlist saved to the device and verified that the correct entries and paths are in there.

Why is this happening? When will this get resolved?

I just tested it some more with the same playlist. I turned off Shuffle, reloaded it, started playing from the beginning. Scanning forward a few pages, I noticed it repeats exactly the first 64 songs, or eight pages of the list.

Tried loading the playlist from the Files menu, from the Folder view, and even from a USB drive. I somehow managed to get it to load correctly once and only once, but I could not replicate that ever again. I’m notiving this with pretty much every playlist I have now. This is very frustrating.

In playing with a **bleep** will play the shuffled songs in the third folder, then stop.

Yep. That’s my problem too. Cuts the playlist to just the first 60 songs and repeats! I haven’t been using the WD as a music player at all lately because of this. It’s too bad because that’s why I bought it.

So I’m out $200 and I give up. We will have to invest in a different product.  Can anyone recommend an alternative to the WD Live Hub?

I’m really hoping they fix this. Can anyone else chime in? Is this a problem more people are seeing?

non-player wrote:

Can anyone else chime in? Is this a problem more people are seeing?

I’d have to presume that everyone is “affected” by it.  It merely appears as if very few people use their player in this manner, since only a few people feel the need to post about it.

We’re working on this.

Slightly off topic, but is there anyway to shuffle all songs on Itunes,? when I go to the music section , it then displays the individual artists, then I press play and I can shuffle that artist, but not my entire music catalogue.

thanks Nick

So you bought the WDTVLIVEHUB for the sole attribute of the quality of its shuffling algorithm?  Is this a legit bug?  Absolutely.  But to declare a lame shuffle algorithm negates the entire value of the device is a little hyperbolic.

When the WDTVLIVE Hub was launched (18 or so months ago) there weren’t a lot of big names cranking out media players.  There’s ALWAYS a competing demand between getting a product to market quickly and technical perfection (the latter NEVER being achieved, ask Microsoft or RedHat or Bjarne Stroustrup).

Sounds to me like instead of taking the time to develop a quality random/seeding algorithm they simply hard coded shuffle to be some order that doesn’t = 1, 2, 3, 4…

I humbly recommend a cup of green tea and watching an old Kung Fu rerun and waiting for the firmware to fix this annoyance.  The WDTVLH has a lot of good features, sadly shuffle ain’t one of 'em and that’s a feature you really care about.  Hang in there or don’t, but I hope you do.

Jim

I have invested a lot of time money to install a background music system throughout my home. I have over 20GB of music that was on a media PC. The sole purpose of this PC was to play this music. The system worked very well but my video scaler died so could no longer broadcast the PC across my linked LCD TVs and it was also time to update the PC. That’s when I learned about the LIVE HUB. According to the description WD web site, the HUB should have been the perfect replacement device for my system.

So to answer your questions: Yes, I purchased the WDTVLIVEHUB for the sole ability to play music, ALL MY SONGS not just the first 60 in the playlist. Also, I feel that the shuffling algorithm needs to work as advertised. If not, the device of little use to me.

I will gladly take your suggestion to drink green tea…. and wait.

We are aware and working on this.  Hopefully this will be released soon.

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^Very glad to hear this! I look forward to the release of the firmware. I appreciate your efforts.

-Jeff

When is there going to be a SHUFFLE for MUSIC VIDEOS as thats all my library consists of now & kind of negates the fact of being a media player if it CANT SHUFFLE… Just curious is there going to be a firmware update video algortium update with the audio music update, as its frustrating trying to entertain friends and family without a shuffle feature.

I tryed audio shuffle for a while but it was not successful. It didnt shuffle over the whole selection so gave up on audio & have replaced entire collection with music videos.

I hope WD will add a shuffle feature for videos (music videos)

I too bought the WDTV soley for playing music. Having the shuffle work correctly is very important to me - I am actively looking for a replacement for the unit due to its dismal shuffling performance. Is this going to be fixed in the near future or is the WDTV a paperweight?

Regards,

Mark