"Shuffle" mode doesn't turn off when selecting an album

[Caleb9849]

Hi all,

Background info: My first smartphone was a Motorola Droid, and after having all kinds of unpleasant experiences with it, and with Android in general, when my "upgrade eligibility" date came along I got an iPhone 4. Despite the infamous lack of customization and "closedness" on the iPhone, I found that the overall experience IMO was much better, as things almost always *worked*, unlike they had on my Droid, and a pretty good majority of the time, they even worked the way I *wanted* them to. In general I'm *not* an Apple fanboy -- in fact, I'm a very serious software programmer, and a Linux user on my desktop, so I really fit into the Android stereotype much better, and have put up with the standard ridicule from my "geek friends" for the last year and a half that I've had an iPhone. But it was worth it for the smoothness, stability, and (ironically) good behavior that it gave me in comparison to other Apple products, and even in comparison to my first experience with an Android phone. Well, a couple weeks ago, along came upgrade time again, and I thought, what the hell, I'll give Android another shot, and I got a Galaxy S4. I really *want* to like Android, but I'm running into a slew of problems with it again, and the following is one of my biggest gripes:

When listening to music, sometimes I want to listen to "whatever," so I tell my music player to just shuffle all my music. Other times I want to listen to a certain album, and I often like to listen to an album in the recorded order, especially when listening to a concept album or rock opera. But when I select an album and then select the first track, I am jarred when the first track ends and another randomly-chosen track begins playing...all because "shuffle" was left enabled, *even though* I manually specified an album and told it to start on track #1. With technology being what it is, I don't feel as though I ought to have to find the microscopic "shuffle" icon and manually disable it *every single time* I want to switch gears and listen to a particular album after I've previously been shuffling my music library. I have tried numerous music player apps besides the stock player and I find that they *all* behave the same way -- is this just some kind of an Android thing, having it always stay on "shuffle" even if you pick a specific album to listen to? When I had my iPhone I could pick an album and expect the album to be played in the right order, even if I had been previously shuffling.

Is there *any* way, on *any* music player app, that I can make it leave "shuffle" mode if I pick a particular album and select track #1?

Thanks all!

 

[SiempreTuna]

I have a similar issue with the Google music player. Might be related to the metadata on the tracks: if the track's metatdata doesn't have the track number, then the player uses some sort of default or random sort. Whatever the default 'sort' is, it doesn't seem sensible or obvious at all.

Never had this issue with earlier phones. It is very, very irritating as it can't be that hard to default to something sensible like alphabetic.

 

[DanPLC]

The music app I developed, Music Player (Remix), allows you to select an album and it'll play it in track order even if the player was previously in shuffle mode. You can also choose to play the album in shuffled order if you'd like.

Also if you're in any list (including "Shuffle All"), you can select an album to be queued to play after the currently playing song. It'll play the tracks from that album in track order, then resume the previous list (and turn shuffle back on if it was on prior to the queuing). And of course you can choose to queue any item (song, album, artist, genre, composer, or playlist).