Notices

The problem I mean is the one where you press the "Shuffle All Songs" button and it adds the whole media library to the playlist. Unfortunately, they are sorted by track title rather than artist or album, meaning that you can't turn off shuffle and play more of the same album when desired. The same applies when trying to shuffle an entire genre.

My first workaround was to create a playlist and shuffle that but it was unsatisfactory because it took too long to load into memory and lacked meta-data on each track. It became a deal-breaker and I had to get by with other media players.

My new workaround is to use mp3tag and Excel to prefix each track title with a simple sequential number, e.g. [1234]. It takes a little time to achieve as each of my 6000 tracks has to be read over USB and re-written in mass-storage mode.

I've had my N900 for 18 months, like it and plan to keep it for a further 6 months before I move to Android for the first time. I would like to keep the N900 as media tablet even after I get my new phone and this makes it more likely.

I thought I'd post some feedback of my first few hours with this setup. I also populated the genre in each mp3tag while I was doing the track title adjustments, to contain the broad categories I use on my PC to identify new music, favourite music, etc.

Now, with working shuffle functions that can be turned off on each of these genres, it's like the Fremantle Media Player suddenly works properly, for audio anyway. Happy days.