OK, if any of you are interested (and I accept most of you aren't but maybe there is someone who is!) here is the current status of investigating the problem and identifying a solution...
Initial observation: In a playlist of 800 tracks (from a total of 6200 tracks on the SD card), if I play the playlist on "random shuffle" then approximately 10 of the first 50 tracks played will have their position in the shuffle play equal to their position in the unshuffled list. So a shuffled playlist is actually 20% unshuffled. This is very consistent, and is way more than would be expected from statistical coincidence (unless, of course, the shuffle algorithm isn't a very good one in which case it is exactly what would be expected).This means in a playlist of (say) 1970s rock tracks, I'll get loads of ACDC at the start and very little UFO. If my phone would stay working long enough to get to the end of the playlist then at the end of the playlist I'd get a lot of UFO and not much ACDC. However, 800 tracks is (say) 3200 minutes, which is 53 hours of playing time, which at my rate of playing means I need to get through more than 3 weeks without the phone white-screening and resetting itself, and this isn't my experience of Nokia firmware.
Assumption 1: the problem is due to the size of the playlist (i.e. a fixed amount of shuffling is being done, before the playlist is played, and some tracks are being missed if there are too many to shuffle - this is particularly plausible as the phone "white-screens" while preparing to play the playlist (but recovers without doing a full reset as long as the playlist is less than around 1200 in size - any more than that and it does do a full reset)).
Testing this assumption: In a playlist of 20 tracks (from the same 6200 tracks), if I play the playlist on "random shuffle" then approximately 4 of the 20 tracks played will have their position in the shuffle play equal to their position in the unshuffled list. This matches the 20% observed in the initial observation. It is consistent, and is way more than would be expected from statistical coincidence. Assumption rejected.
Assumption 2: this is due to the number of tracks in total (this is plausible as most of my 5310 problems started when the number of tracks went past 4096 (2 to the power 12)).
Testing this assumption: In a playlist of 935 tracks (from a total of 935 tracks on a different SD card), if I play the playlist on "random shuffle" then approximately 10 of the first 50 tracks played will have their position in the shuffle play equal to their position in the unshuffled list. This is again consistent, and is again way more than would be expected from statistical coincidence. Assumption rejected.
Assumption 3: this is due to my 5310 being in some way dodgy.
Testing this assumption: I need someone else with a 5310 to shuffle-play a playlist and write down the order in which tracks were played. I've shown above it actually doesn't really matter how big the playlist is.
Assumption 4: this is due to all 5310s (or all S40-based music-phones (or all Nokia music-phones)) being in some way dodgy.
Testing this assumption: I need someone else with a different phone to shuffle-play a playlist and write down the order in which tracks were played. I've shown above it doesn't seem really to matter how big the playlist is.
So I've got as far as I can without some help from someone else. Anyone out there willing to lend a hand to the investigation? Thanks in advance if anyone is, but I appreciate it's fairly obscure.
Now for some possible solutions:
I can't misuse the "genre" field in the ID3 tag to impose some randomness of my own, as I use mainly WMA files and my phone only sees the genre tag on MP3 files... which seems pretty poor for a music phone (but at least these days it can get to the end of a track without crashing, which is more than it could consistently manage when the firmware that was on when I first got it!)
So the only thing I can think of doing is to misuse the "Artist" and "Title" tag field. A playlist is sorted by artist (if you add to it using artist name, which is the easiest way) and within each artist by track title. So if I:
- pick 800 random files and replace the artist tag with "artist 1"
- for each file within this group, replace the title tag with a random number (I can do these random numbers with programming, so I can ensure the numbers have a better degree of randomness than Nokia provides).
- repeat this until all files have been processed.
Then, if I load these files onto the phone and use the "Artists" item in the Music Menu, I will get (for my files) eight different numbered artists. If I play each 'artist' list
without shuffle play then the tracks will come out in a properly random order.
Problems with this are:
- This has to be redone every time I've been through all the tracks, otherwise I will always get things in the same random order. I can't shuffle-play my random lists, as then the basic problem identified above means I would get some of the random items more often than others. My phone's lack of randomness would undermine the better randomness I am trying to impose.
- The S40 operating system doesn't seem to give me programmatic access to playlists, and so I will need to do this on my computer, and then recopy all the media files to the phone, and then wait while it reindexes alll the tracks. This means it is slow and clunky
- It's basically a total kludge.
The only other solution I can think of at the moment is to stop caring and accept I'll hear some tracks less often than others.
If you've got this far and have any ideas, comments, or experiences from other phones, then I'd be pleased to hear them.
Ta very much
Andy
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