Feature Request - shuffle folders, play tracks in order

[angstroem]

I've been a long time user of poweramp but am considering to finally switch over to neutron since the DSP-functions are outstanding.

However, there is one kind of unique feature of poweramp I really miss: the possibility to shuffle between subfolders (which each represent an album) while maintaining the track order inside this folders.

What poweramp does as I unterstand it is treating every subfolder as playlist and allowing you to easily skip to the next playlist with an extra set of skip-buttons. The shuffle options allow you to either shuffle every track, shuffle between lists but maintain the track-order within the list and shuffle between lists while also shuffling the track-order within a list (kind of a double-shuffle).

With the play option set to "continue with next list", once the current album is finished, it basically randomly changes to another album and plays it back in its intended order.

Since this is one of the functions I use multiple times every day, I would love to see it implemented into Neutron.

Thanks a lot!

[blaubär]

Yes, and that was rather a mess in poweramp until the users and the developer had eventually agreed upon what exactly this feature should do . For the first months after rollout you could activate "shuffle categories" but it would then switch to any other folder/album not just the ones you'd expect. The developer had to add special filters to restrict the shuffled folders/albums to those of the initially chosen artist. I'd also expect this feature to be rather complicated to specify, implement and support in Neutron.

[angstroem]

That must have been a long time ago. I am using poweramp since my very first android device, round about 8 years ago. A long as I can remember this feature worked for me.

It shouldn't be that hard to implement it in Neutron since it already offers most of the necessary functionality. At the moment I can skip to the next folder (=album), only the function to skip to a random folder is not available yet.

Edit: if it shuffles to a folder of the same artist once in a while, I would be absolutely fine with it.

[blaubär]

That wasn't that long ago, in the beginning of PA V3. Maybe it had worked before with PA V2.
Btw : shuffle isn't random. Shuffling means you get each group exactly once, but in a random sequence, which has been decided at one time and has to be stored and kept up until the sequence is finished. Random would mean that the decision which group comes next is taken each time the group changes. Afaik PA does shuffling not random. Random might be easier though, but would mean that with a certain probability the same group will be chosen multiple times in a row. Which won't happen with shuffling.

[blaubär]

As to shuffle vs random see also Shuffle Mode Prefer Higher Rated Songs
So I suggest we expand your request to "currently we can only ever shuffle tracks, we'd like to have two new modes, or at least one of them, shuffle groups and random groups".

[angstroem]

To be honest, my experience with Poweramp v3 is very little. I found the new UI to be pretty terrible and downgraded to v3 alpha, which shared a lot with v2 as far as I know.

In this version shuffling folders was implemented as a randomizer (it would happen to get to the same folder as before after 2-3 changes). If that is easier to implement, I would be fine with it.