Any way to play subfolders?

[armarni]

Hi

Just got my h140 and it blows my old xclef800 away in terms of functionality. However, there seems to be a glaring ommission. To put it briefly, the iriver wont play subfolders. This is incredibly annoying. I organise my music into folders and subfolders and on the simplest level, if I have a 2 disc cd with each cd in a seperate folder, then I can only play 1 folder at once. I know there are ways round it with playlists or searching by artist, but that only goes so far. I have so many artists logged that scrolling down to one in the middle of the alphabet takes forever and that doesnt help if the cds are compilations with various artists. Playing by genre might be another way of dealing with it, but thats too broad a brushsrtoke most of the time. Similarly I dont want to have to make play lists for every eventuality, when a simple thing like allowing it to read subfolders would sort the problem. Am I missing something here?
Does anyone else find this annoying?

[Galley]

All my files are organized by Artist\Album, and when one Album folder is finished, it moves onto the next, even if it is in a different Artist folder. Yours isn't doing that?

[armarni]

Hi Galley

Thanks for replying. I'll give you an example of what i mean...I have 12 albums by artist 'x' in seperate subfolders within artist 'x' main folder. I want to randomly play songs from all artist 'x' albums, so what I did on my old xclef 800 was create a 1 sec mp3 called silence in the main artist 'x' folder, play it and then it would read the subfolders and randomly play all the tracks..bingo. Doing the same on the iriver it just plays the 1 sec 'silence' mp3, and doesnt then look in the subfolders. Starting within a subfolder just plays tracks from within that folder (ie one album). I know I can play tracks by artist using the database but thats not practical with compilation albums as well as being a pain to navigate. Any clues?

[winty]

Hi Armarni,

Welcome along With the file organisation you're using, it will do exactly what Galley said. For example, if you have an artist directory called "Massive Attack" and then 2 subfolders in there called "100th Window" and "Protection", start playing track 1 of "100th Window" and it will play the whole album, and then it will automatically move on to "Protection" and play that whole album. After that is complete, it will move on to the next alphabetical artist (in my case Max Richter )

Basically, it proceeds in an alphabetical manner through your entire player.

As for playing randomly, I can't answer that, as I don't use that feature.

[armarni]

thanks winty

I appreciate the help you've both given, and its useful info. I personally miss the ability to randomly play music from within subfolders...its useful especially when using the iriver as a jukebox for a party. Surely one reason we have such a great device is to have large amounts of tracks which we sometimes dont want to hear in the same order.

[y0da]

shuffle

[armarni]

Thanks for trying yOda but that doesnt recognise subfolders unfortunately. You can shuffle the whole player, a single directory or bizarely a single track!!! Not a folder and all the folders within it exclusivley

[winty]

I suppose you could lose the album directory, and rename the files to include the album name. That way, you'd have a directory of artist tracks that you could shuffle. It would be hell to work out which track was which on the iHP screen.

This is definitely a weak area for the iRiver.

[uXs]

Originally Posted by armarni

Thanks for trying yOda but that doesnt recognise subfolders unfortunately. You can shuffle the whole player, a single directory or bizarely a single track!!! Not a folder and all the folders within it exclusivley

Shuffling a single track is great ! You have so much variety !

[randle]

Shuffling a single track is great ! You have so much variety !

Yeah, especially when its the one second of silence track.....

just create playlists of whateva you want to play... its the easiest way.... and it really doesn't take that long... I've got 7500 songs on my player now and it didn't take long to do the inital 5000... plus its totally worth it because you can make sure the crap songs in albums don't play

it will be great once we get the playlists on the fly feature (assuming iRiver make it half decent!!)

[coreman]

I've got 35 playlists on my player to compensate for this problem but they work well....and are very easy to create.

[armarni]

Thanks for all your input guys, I'll go down the playlist route. As someone who's had a player that can do it, its a real plus and would make a simple yet obvious addition in a later firmware release.