Yes… I have the Media Library enabled and yes I have searched the forums and YES… I am a newb with this device but certainly not media players in general.
So far I have been unable to access what should be the most basic of functions… I just want to select a genre or artist and play everything under that heading - shuffled.
With a device that already creates a database of all the media files this should be very easy, but I can’t find out how to do it without creating a huge playlist for each artist and genre - and that’s just absurd for a large library.
I’m sorry if this is a total newb question. I really have looked over the manual, searched through it and the forums and not figured this out. I have seen a number of posts that would seem to indicate this may not be possible but they were addressing other questions, not this specifically.
Anybody who can give me a yes or no on this?
Can I shuffle a whole genre without creating a playlist including each song in the genre?
You should be able to shuffle on genre. If you go to the genre display, play a track, press the option button on the remote and cycle through the options using the enter button until you see the shuffle icon (it looks like an x with arrows on).
You can also set up shuffle play in the music setting menu under ‘music sequence’ and after that all music will be automatically shuffled.
I will say that the shuffling can take some time and it may look like the WDTV is hung up. If this happens don’t press any more buttons for a while as they may be acted upon after the WDTV has shuffled which could prolong the ‘hang up’. I have found it better to set shuffle in the settings as this is quicker and less prone to hang ups.
Thanks for the reply. My problem is that all my music is arranged as albums - just like Windows Media Player arranges them. So when I drop into Genre… there are no tracks to play until I drop into a subfolder. I saw some postings talking about no subdirectory recursion which seems to indicate that the WDTV will only play files in the current folder and not below that level. That would make shuffling a whole genre impossible unless all the files are located in the genre folder together. Is that really the case… it seems bizarre for a media player to not play into subfolders.
Sorry about that. I have just tried it and I can see what you mean. The only way round it as you say would be to make a shuffled playlist. In WD’s defence I would say that I believe they see this more as a HD movie player than a full blown audio player. However the WDTV can read the genre so I don’t understand why WD left out the ability to do as you require. You could post your suggestion on the ideas board and see what WD says.
This is really too bad. The most minimal music player has the ability to shuffle genre’s, artists, etc. Even my rather buggy old Rockford OmniFi can do that and it has nowhere near the CPU or memory that the WDTV has. Of course my tiny little Sandisk and Creative portables can do this with ease.
Really all I wanted out of the WDTV was a good music player that would work off a local USB drive. I didn’t even care a whole lot about streaming. If this thing could shuffle an entire genre or artist I would be happy, but that seems not to be the case.
So my requirements, althought rather minimal, aren’t being met by the WDTV. Sad. I guess it goes back to the store and my quest to find a full featured MUSIC player continues. I don’t even care about photos and video at this point.
Dang!
IS THERE A GOOD ALL AROUND NETWORK MEDIA PLAYER OUT THERE? ARGH!
It’s strange that companies like WD don’t get it… if you want to break into a market like this and make a name for yourself it has to be because your device works so well that word of mouth spreads. Half measures, whether from WD, Rockford, ASUS or anybody else simply result in failed products and lost revenue.
I guess in WD’s defence, there doesn’t appear to be anybody out there doing it right at this point.
I came on board this forum today hoping to find the answer to the very question you ask — I want to be able to play all of my CLASSIC ROCK albums/artists/songs, then go on CLASSICAL, etc, etc, but couldn’t find a way to do it. I set up everything as I wanted it via iTunes, then I access my hard drive via WD LIVE and under artist, I can only access each album and play just that…I can’tr even play all the albums by the same artist.
Do you think w emight petition WD to address this very disappointing oversight?
IS THERE A GOOD ALL AROUND NETWORK MEDIA PLAYER OUT THERE? ARGH!
The answer is no. This is still a developing market with only a few chip makers offering their wares to device manufacturers. It seems to date that NMT are either good at music or good and audio but not both at the same time. None of them are good at photo displays.
Thanks… that’s the answer I assumed would come back. It’s sad really. Yes… it is in some sense an emerging market BUT network media players upnp and proprietary solutions have been around for almost 10 years. There SHOULD BE mature products out there that get it right.
In the case of this thread… WDTV Live… one of the better regarded NMP’s is completely incapable of a basic feature found in any $30 portable mp3 player. Who sits in on these design meetings?
I agree that this blows. I did get this to work as your were asking using Twonky Server, but I wasn’t happy with the Twonky video playback (occasional stuttering and no sub-titles) and I really don’t want to have to swich between network, media server, and local drive for each different media type I want to play… You should also be able to click Play from any music point and play all the music from there (all music, genre, artist, album, etc.) on a local drive set up with media library (like it works with Twonky Server) You shouldn’t have to drill down to a song to start playing music…
Ditto on that! It’s incredibly sad! The WD TV Live Plus works fine for me for video - the dvd menus in dvd isos work just like they should and the video quality is great. Netflix works very nicely with great video quality, and so does other online content if it isn’t too overcrowded to load. I enjoyed watching Karem Elson play a few live songs very much. But music playback absolutely ■■■■■ without being able to play multiple folders or create a playlist of multiple folders on the fly.
I haven’t even tried running a slideshow of photos, I got stopped dead in my tracks with music before I got to photos.
I’m bringing mine back to Best Buy within a week and I’ll look into building a compact sized htpc, just to display dvd rips and play music. What an overkill of processing power!
I’m astonished that a dedicated media player can’t handle music at least as well as my cellphone. Sadly, it doesn’t seem as though anything out there at this point works any better, other than an htpc. I guess the people in the “think tank” where they design these products (who I suspect are very, very high paid for the abysmal job they do) don’t listen to much music during the day, eh?
Bah!
I also don’t like the fact that the Live writes data on my hard drive. It can’t be astrophysics to add an interface to make, say, the creative zen stone to read a hard drive like it reads it’s built in flash memory, or my Sony 580i to read an inserted memory stick, can it? Geez …
I also have been looking for a Media Player that does justice to my music collection, as you have described. Thankfully the Twonky Server solution (per cowannematt) works for me. However this requires NAS, which not everyone has or wants. You could use your Media PC as NAS! ;<()
You are right, the manufacturers seem to have concentrated on video (I don’t care!), but ignored the “details” of music and photo playback. This might not change in the near future since music ,especially, has taken a back-seat (trunk? glovebox?) to the boob-tube.
I have all my music backed up on one of the computers on my network. When I play music on a “Media Server” (i.e. the computer on which all of my music is backed up), I can play all songs in a genre.
This is the way it should work. It is unacceptable that it doesn’t work this way when you try to play music by genre on local media! (Knocks the stuffing out of trying to be “green” if I always have to have the computer running too!)
I also have a WDTV and you can play all songs in a genre as we want.
I previously sent a note to WD tech support and received a lame reply. They said that it was a “hardware issue” and could not be changed. That’s just BS. If it can work properly on a WDTV it can also work on a WDTV Live. It’s just a matter of software coding.
This sounds like a show stopper for me. I looked at the WDTV Live last year and almost purchased for use as a music player through my TV. But I waited since it seemed iminent that they were going to support Netflix. Now here I am again reading bad reviews on such a simple task as playing music randomly.
If someone from WD is following this post, can you answer if this is something you are working to correct?
Believe it or not, the best network music player (for MP3 at least) is an old AudioTron. The dont make em anymore, but you might find on eBay. About 10 years old … still the BEST way to listen to MP3s stored on file servers. Dont even need a TV.
