Shuffling music GoGear vibe (SA2VBE16K/02)

[Spike]

Another afterthought: So, I now think that, on the SA2, the Down button doesn't just abort the song currently playing and advance to the song that would be next up, as I thought; it may reshuffle or transport you to a different place in the shuffle list. Am curious to know the truth, though someone at Philips might have to phone Germany.

[kwinnie]

i m just using the down button ...maybe i should just let it play....
I myself doesnt recognise the within-folder shuffle issue. As I use album as a folder, if it doesnt know shuffle the songs outside the folder, it should be repeating the songs from the same singer... but as i observe it can shuffle songs outside the folder...

[technotobe]

Wow! When i posted thought there was maybe just a glitch or problem with my player but never realised there could be so many possible reasons/answers! You guys are really doing some good stuff there- i currently have 1003 songs on my player and couldnt imagine recording them all but maybe i will remove most until i have around 50 and compare with your results, i have skipped through while on shuffle and it appears to randomise quite well though, it wasnt so long ago i had half as many songs and in there it was noticeable if i heard the same one or didnt hear one for a while, guess a question is how does it mark off the song as played when repeat is off so as to not play that song again since the number of songs stays constant (eg 18/1003...356/1003 etc) one thing though- what is with the down button? I press mine while in shuffle and it doesnt do anything!
Am currently on I on my A-Z so still some time yet to go, already i find it less than perfect since i get similar songs or even the same song done by someone else or like yesterday 4 hero songs in a row!!

[Spike]

Shuffle-within-folder is only activated if you select Music and instead of Shuffle All or Smart Shuffle All, you pick another selection basis such as genre or artist. Technotobe, the fact that you are seeing 18/1003 or 356/1003 means you are surfing the entire collection; when you pick a limited result set, that "1003" changes to a much smaller number. I too am in doubt whether the failure I noticed has passed, perhaps on getting to know the player better; but I wish the manual gave, or the admins here would provide, more detailed information on exactly how Shuffle works.

Likewise, Kwinnie, if you have restricted play to a single album, the "denominator" at the top of the screen will be the number of songs on that album and it won't venture outside that album.

There are ample files in the root directory of the player that might indicate what the shuffle order is and/or that a song has been played. I even found one with each song's SmartShuffle score. I think that the player builds these tables, the first time you use it as a player after using it as a hard disk, during the time you see "20% Done" and so on. Songbird may build other tables to relate a song to which album art to use. But Songbird installs a driver so you no longer see the player as a "hard disk" with a drive letter and you can't see files in the root directory.

WBLM-FM in Portland, Maine occasionally does an A-to-Z through their very ample playlist. Their results are also "less than perfect" but it is an event that some listeners cherish.

[Philips - Andrea]

Hi all

Thanks for your queries!

We are now passing your queries to the technical team for investigation. We will get back to you as soon as we have more information from the team.

Thanks for participating and I hope you have fun continuing to do so!

Kind regards,
Philips Moderation Team

[kwinnie]

thanks andrea.... i do think this needs the intervention of software team

[Spike]

PS--I am running firmware version 2.21. Just saw that you have newer firmware this summer and again downloaded and installed Songbird, this time on a new, 1.6 GHz machine with WinXP. ("RDSconfig" crashed multiple times, perhaps because this PC was offline during install.) Songbird came up (underneath other windows!), still very slow like the first time. Don't need a new media player, don't need a new web browser, don't need help organizing my files, don't need new marketing offers from partner companies, don't see why it takes 2 minutes to "mount" the device or 3 minutes to locate a new upload. The description of Songbird says it includes the newest firmware, but it doesn't; it compels the user to go on-line. It found 2.31 but reported an error installing it on three attempts. As the notes say that all that has changed is "performance," with which I did not have a problem, I am done with this exercise and will now uninstall Songbird, which last time required manual edits to the Windows Registry.

To restate my query: With 446 songs now on my player, there should be a long time between a song playing twice. There is not. In my opinion, the unit should only reshuffle (1) after you connect USB and transfer files and (2) when you select Music > All songs > [Smart] Shuffle all. Power off and back on should not reshuffle. And shuffling should create an entirely new sequence using a random number (there is always a random number, perhaps the number of microseconds after power-on before my first button press). Hope you can provide additional information.

[Spike]

PS--The player today subtracted 1 hour from the current time as of my SECOND use of it today. In other words, it doesn't realize that the US Congress redefined Daylight Savings Time in 2005 (and will surely redefine it again some day on a whim). It is not the greatest clock, but it's the only one in my car, and this bit of artificial intelligence results in the need for four additional manual adjustments per year.

[Philips - Cassandra]

Hi Spike,

Currently we are aware of a system error that may cause some problems downloading the firmware. We are looking into this. Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

Kind Regards,
Cassandra

[GabrielC]

Hi all,

Unfortunately I do not have the answer related to this question/topic, the reason I’m posting this here is because it was the only way of contacting this company, with the hope that there is someone from Philips that is monitoring the traffic.
It is quite a disappointment to see how such an important company as Philips is treating its clients, in Romania there are 4 phone numbers published on the web site, but none of them is allocated, or there is nobody to answer during working hours. I’m trying to purchase a cable for an MP3 device that is no longer working and there is nobody to contact or to answer. So, dear Philips representatives, could you please ask your peers from Romania to open the phone lines and actually use them as such? Thank you. Gabriel Cosoreanu: gcosoreanu@gmail.com
That’s way I’ve decided to post this in all the forum topics. Again apologise for the “off topic” post.

[Spike]

Cassandra, thank you for your reply. But this morning, I notice that the SD card I used to move Songbird onto the installation computer (it also scanned it and found .FLV files that it refused to convert for want of a codec) is displaying a different device icon. It seems this card now has a new HIDDEN SYSTEM file with the illegal name of .SBSettings.xml that points to Songbirdnest.com and my Autorun file has been DELETED. I have removed Songbird from the target computer, and finished purging "Philips" from the Registry, including a couple of keys that were LOCKED AGAINST ME. You may ignore my query, as I regard Songbird as a virus and will not do this again even if you locate and correct a bug in Shuffle. There is no reason firmware update could not be achieved by dragging-and-dropping a file to the ViBE, from which it would update itself on the next restart, except someone's desire for post-purchase control over the consumer. This is not as bad as the SanDisk Sansa Clip--which would not communicate with my PC until I opened an account with MusicMatch--but it's bad.

[Philips - Cassandra]

Hi GabrielC,

Please check your inbox, I have sent you a direct message with more information.

Kind Regards,
Cassandra

[Philster]

Sorry for not keeping an eye on this thread until now.

In answer to Kwinnie's question in the first page, I'm definitely not using smart shuffle (realized the second day of using this device that smart shuffle was not for me!). But ordinary shuffle certainly seems somehow 'contaminated' by the smart shuffle concept.

There's one album in my collection that has about 20 songs but after months of using the Ariaz I've still only heard about four of the songs. I've had to delete the songs that the device 'favours' in order to give the other songs a chance of being selected!

[Philips - Cassandra]

Hi Spike,

I have also sent you a private message regarding the issue you were having. Please check you inbox.

Kind regards,
Cassandra

Cassandra, thank you for your reply. But this morning, I notice that the SD card I used to move Songbird onto the installation computer (it also scanned it and found .FLV files that it refused to convert for want of a codec) is displaying a different device icon. It seems this card now has a new HIDDEN SYSTEM file with the illegal name of .SBSettings.xml that points to Songbirdnest.com and my Autorun file has been DELETED. I have removed Songbird from the target computer, and finished purging "Philips" from the Registry, including a couple of keys that were LOCKED AGAINST ME. You may ignore my query, as I regard Songbird as a virus and will not do this again even if you locate and correct a bug in Shuffle. There is no reason firmware update could not be achieved by dragging-and-dropping a file to the ViBE, from which it would update itself on the next restart, except someone's desire for post-purchase control over the consumer. This is not as bad as the SanDisk Sansa Clip--which would not communicate with my PC until I opened an account with MusicMatch--but it's bad.

[Spike]

More details. I now have a pad of paper in front of me rather than a steering wheel, for a controlled test of an SA2 4Gb ViBE containing 613 songs, to test it in repeated power-off/power-on cycles.

I found no case where the ViBE failed to return to the exact point in the exact song that it was playing when I turned it off. It seems that, after "Music > All songs > Shuffle all" it makes an alphabetical list of the entire collection based on song title in the ID3 inside the MP3 file. It picks a random increment and advances to the next song in the list by adding that number to the song number. But every 2 to 5 plays, it jumps around more randomly and may change the increment.

I did not find a wholesale tendency to play songs that had already played before. But twice (out of 10 tries), after finishing the song that was playing before the power interruption, the next song it selected was a song that had played recently before. On one of those two times, the first two songs played were the exact same songs that played after the previous power interruption.

So my best explanation of what is going on is that the ViBE might not always save all the information it uses to carry out Shuffle Mode in the permanent memory before it shuts down. This is a bug. A workaround might be to manually reshuffle every time one powers up the unit, though this too might make the ViBE cough up songs that had played recently before the reshuffle.

Separately, on two occasions, the ViBE displayed a song number at the top of the screen that was not the number of the song that was playing. Both times, the next song selected was that song number; that is, the song title changed and the song number did not.