Shuffle albums within playlist

[WYYoung]

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to shuffle albums in a playlist. Say I have 4 albums in a playlist. For simplicity's sake, say each one has 10 songs. I want to be able to shuffle the playlist so it plays album X, from song 1 to song 10 in order. Then it plays some other album in my playlist, from song 1 to song 10 in order. And so on.

I've tried setting the global shuffle setting to Shuffle Songs/Categories, Shuffle Categories, and Shuffle Songs but nothing seems to work. I just want an option within a playlist where I can choose "Shuffle songs in list" or "Shuffle albums in list" or "Play all in order". Is there any way to do that?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[andrewilley]

The problem is that playlists don't contain any details about artists, albums, or even songs. They just contain a series of hard-coded links to each file on the device's storage, in no particular order apart from how the user chose to add them. e.g:

D0D8-84ED/Audio/Music/Jim Steinman/Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young - Fire Inc.mp3
D0D8-84ED/Audio/Music/Electric Light Orchestra/(1981) Time/12 - Hold on Tight - ELO.mp3
D0D8-84ED/Audio/Music/Bonnie Tyler/Faster Than the Speed of Night - Bonnie Tyler.mp3
D0D8-84ED/Audio/Music/Jim Steinman/Bad For Good/02 Bad For Good - Jim Steinman.mp3
D0D8-84ED/Audio/Music/Ultravox & Midge Ure/Love's Great Adventure - Ultravox.mp3
D0D8-84ED/Audio/Music/Electric Light Orchestra/(1979) Discovery/01 - Shine a Little Love - ELO.mp3
D0D8-84ED/Audio/Music/Ultravox & Midge Ure/(1981) Rage in Eden (Definitive Edition)/1-01 - The Voice - Ultravox.mp3

The order can be edited (PA has a 'Re-Sort' option which moves songs around the list based on separate Library data) but otherwise a Playlist is just one long list of files.

Andre

[WYYoung]

Ugh. This is the one feature I really want. I moved from Rocket Player because, although I like its UI and how it operates (and it does have shuffle by album), it's now crashing constantly. I've seen Poweramp recommended in so many places I decided to try it, but this is something really bothering me.

In theory, I think Poweramp should be able to look at either the metadata or sort at least by the folder name. Anyway, thanks for letting me know.

[andrewilley]

6 minutes ago, WYYoung said:

In theory, I think Poweramp should be able to look at either the metadata or sort at least by the folder name.

As I said, it can if you use the Re-Sort feature. You can re-order a playlist by folder name, filename, or various items of metadata found in the files (such as album, artist, etc). However that is a one-time reorder, once you've done it the playlist is saved in that new sequence until you next re-sort it. Playback will follow either that defined order (which is the whole point of playlists) or be randomised if Shuffle is enabled. But at playback time, there is no concept of albums or other structures within the list, it's just a sequential set of filenames. 

Andre

[WYYoung]

Oh, I see! In other words, I can pre-shuffle (sort the entire playlist) and then play. I'll give that a try. Do you know if I can re-sort back to the original order?

[MotleyG]

55 minutes ago, WYYoung said:

Ugh. This is the one feature I really want. I moved from Rocket Player because, although I like its UI and how it operates (and it does have shuffle by album), it's now crashing constantly. I've seen Poweramp recommended in so many places I decided to try it, but this is something really bothering me.

In theory, I think Poweramp should be able to look at either the metadata or sort at least by the folder name. Anyway, thanks for letting me know.

You can do this from the Album list, but not from a Playlist. As @andrewilley mentioned previously, a playlist is just a series of pointers to music files, the artist and album are not related in a playlist.

[andrewilley]

54 minutes ago, WYYoung said:

Do you know if I can re-sort back to the original order?

No, once you've changed the order of the lines in a playlist, that's what the file now contains.

Think of it like a deck of cards, you can move the cards around the deck however you want, but you can't magically put them back in the original sequence again.

Andre

[WYYoung]

Thanks, all. Sadly, this is one of those nice-to-have features that I really want. I suppose I can live without it, though.