Help Shuffle in Play Music

[SiempreTuna]

Has anybody worked out how Play Music orders tracks

I have once or twice had it play things in the order they're displayed in the 'album' (I listen to podcasts, so it's a grouping of podcasts rather than an actual album), however usually the tracks are played in what appears to be an entirely random order and I cannot find a way to change it

The Shuffle option doesn't appear to do anything. Well, it's possible it uses a different sort of random, but nothing I try appears to make things play in the order in which they're displayed .. actually, often they're not even displayed in a logical - i.e. alphabetic - order

Needless to say, this is really, really irritating when you're listening to a series of lectures or podcasts after track 5 it goes to track 17 or 19 or 35 when you clearly want it to go to track 6

I had the same issue with the the earlier versions: was kinda hoping they'd managed to fix such basic funcionality by now.

 

[El Presidente]

Does it not look at the ID3 tags? Is your collection tagged correctly?

I made sure all mine was tagged correctly before it was uploaded and all of my stuff plays in order.

 

[OhSeven]

I took a moment to look at it, here's what I see. From the library, I look at an album. They are sorted according to track #, I don't know what it reverts to if that metadata is missing. Clicking on the first track adds the album to a playlist in the correct order. Here's what might be getting you--toggling shuffle on/off never returns the playlist back to the correct order. Shuffle on: randomizes order, shuffle off: keeps it in current order. To get the playlist back in original order, I went back to the album view and tapped on a song again.

 

[SiempreTuna]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I don't know if the track # tags are populated, but I wouldn't be surprised if for many podcasts they weren't - most podcasters aren't too technical. There doesn't appear to be a way of seeing the track properties in the player so I'll have to take a look at them when I get home. I guess its also possible that the tool I use to reduce the bitrate / shrink the files isn't transferring the metadata properly.

I have tried going in and out of the album view, however that doesn't appear to change anything. I don't actually see any difference when I hit the shuffle option either, so I don't really know if shuffle is on or off. Maybe this is ID3 tags related, too: if the tags are missing, perhaps shuffle isn't supported .. or something.

If it does turn out to be missing metadata, I may suggest to Google that, when the ID3 tags aren't populated, they sort alphabetically rather than not sort at all .. like every other player does