Random play/large playlist questions

[Sputnikk]

Hi,

I'm in LOVE w/ subsonic and paid the 10 fee. Even put a few friends onto it who are also in love with it.

I use it in the following fashion:

I have two drives.

Drive B - Downloads folder - is a untagged, unorganized folder full of downloads, movies, mp3s, etc. It is part of subsonic indexing
Drive A - Media Drive - NOTHING gets placed here until its been tagged up properly, renamed to match my desired format and I actually want whatever it is for a long period of time. Folder structure is Music --> 5 diff generic genres --> Artist --> Album (if more than one per artist, if not skip) --> mp3s.

My main use for subsonic was to be able to easily listen to stuff in my downloads folder while working to be able to go through and figure out what i like and want to keep. This works fine for individual folders.

Second use was to stream while riding my motorcycle. Works fairly good there as well.

Third - sometimes I just want to select my entire "Rock" genre folder and play random songs, from random artists in random albums. This is where I start getting into heavy trouble.

When trying to access random functionality I don't believe it is working as intended. Picking 15 songs from my entire collection at a time is not something I want to do on my android. I'm a mood listener. I do not want to jump genres.

So I browse my list, browse to the "Rock" folder, which btw has a +Singles+ folder on top of all the artists for those individual tracks that don't deserve a whole folder. For starters, this takes FOREVER. I read up on some of that and its causes, trying out the custom apk i've seen posted here. But OK, I can deal w/ that. The result is an alphabetically sequential list of all the songs in the Rock folder starting from +Singles+, then the alphabet.

OK so, every other night when I sit down to play battlefield I obviously don't want to listen to the same sequence of songs. I want to shuffle here. THIS ALSO TAKES FOREVER. Not only that, the more annoying thing is somehow its not TRULY random shuffling or random playing. The top of this "reshuffled" list somehow still mainly contains stuff from +Singles+ and other folders alphabetically at the top - inside of "Rock" (As, Bs, etc.)

SUPER annoying. Always end up listening to the same "round" of tracks. I shouldn't have to change my directory structure, you know?

So i tried a small work around, create a playlist of everything Rock and take out the +Singles+ tracks from it. Save it. Load it up in android and reshuffle every time. This fails miserably too. Loading it takes FOREVER. Reshuffle still doesn't work too well, and probably because the playlist is a few 1000 songs long - when i switch tracks it Force Closes on me.

Its like the only random function thats truly useful is the "random tracks from your entire collection" w/ the "play 15 other ones" option I have yet to see.

I can deal w/ the slowness if it accomplished my music exploration goals

Appreciate any insight someone can provide.

[martyscholes]

If I follow what you wrote, you have the following issues:
1. Shuffling takes a long time with a 1000+ song playlist
2. Sometimes the shuffle is not truly random
3. Sometimes the app dies

I suspect that you just have too many songs in your playlist. Try it with a shorter playlist.

I have similar needs in that I use Subsonic to do the following things:
1. Primarily, to download podcasts that I listen to. I will load up several for the drive to work each morning and delete the one's I have listened to, so the "now playing" list shows what I have not yet heard.
2. Listen to random tracks of any genre to pass the time while I focus on work
3. Listen to random Old Time Radio shows as I doze off at night

To do all of this, when I want to switch away from podcasts, I will save the current playlist then load up the genre I want (Music, OTR, whatever) then shuffle and let it roll. The next morning, I reload the playlist I saved and add new podcasts.

Here's the problem: I cannot figure out how to delete the playlist from the Android client. Heck, it took me 20 minutes to find the playlists on the web app. Every day I keep adding yet-another-playlist to the list.

I feel stupid even asking, but how do I delete the playlists on the Android client?

Thanks,
Marty