[Req] Album Shuffle option

The "shuffle by album" function is absent from the iPhone. It's one of the good things in iTunes and (most of the) iPods. For people who

• like to be surprized but get crazy from listening to a different artist every three minutes, or
• listen to classical music (where it makes little sense to hear just one movement instead of the whole work),

the album shuffle was a great function. If you have many albums of the same artist, you don't want to hear the collected works of one artist for a whole day.

Is there a chance of patching MobileMusicPlayer.app to provide this function?

EDIT: Recommended solution is in post #17 below.

I found a workaround that activates album shuffle on a jailbroken phone. Not very elegant, but it did the job for me.

1. Get into the iPhone's file system somehow (either with an SSH solution or with something like iPhoneList). Find the file /private/var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mobileipod.plist and copy it to your computer.
2. Somehow edit this file. It's in binary form, so a text editor won't do. I converted it to text-form using this website. If you have Perl installed you can use the plutil.pl script to do that, and on Macs there may be a built-in plist editor that handles the binary format.
3. Change the string under MusicPreferedShuffleOnSetting from Songs to Albums.
4. Put the modified file back in its place on the iPhone. No need to convert it back to binary format; the music player does that the next time it runs.
5. When using it, make sure not to select "Shuffle" at the top of the songs list -- this will initiate shuffle by song. Also, don't go into one particular album, because then play will stop after that album is done. Instead, get a list with many songs on the screen (either a playlist or by at some point selecting "All Albums" and then "All Songs"); then pick one song; then during play click the album cover once to bring up the little progress bar. At the right side of it is a shuffle icon. When that is selected (blue), you're in album shuffle.

Clearly this is simply a hidden setting. If Apple wanted they could have included it in the Settings menu for "iPod". I wonder if someone can make a little change to the Settings menu to include it? Don't know if that's easy or not...

Hi there,
a little of topic, but:

I also searched for a lost iPod function: Hide Compilations, but i was unable to find it, does anyone stumble over this ??

Would be great to only have to browse through some Interprets when searching for a beloved album instead of having all "one hit wonders" in that list from a compilation you stored...

Greetings,

Ender

Quote:

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Originally Posted by enderffx

Hi there,
a little of topic, but:

I also searched for a lost iPod function: Hide Compilations, but i was unable to find it, does anyone stumble over this ??

Would be great to only have to browse through some Interprets when searching for a beloved album instead of having all "one hit wonders" in that list from a compilation you stored...

Greetings,

Ender

---

It must be somewhere in the application, at least there is a string "Compilations" in the strings list /Applications/MobileMusicPlayer.app/English.lproj/iPodSettings.strings.

I looked at a few candidate settings variables, but they did nothing. MainMenuShowCompilationsHint must have something to do with the main iPod menu. MusicCompilationsEnabledSetting looked promising in this respect, but no, it didn't hide artists who only appear on compilation albums, from the Artists menu (which I suppose is what you're looking for).

It turns out the Album Shuffle solution I posted above is not persistent. It doesn't survive a relaunch of Springboard or a reboot of the phone. When the Mobile Music Player starts, it resets the shuffle settings to defaults I can't control.

Of course I cannot SSH into the phone every time I want Album Shuffle. So I downloaded plutil for iPhone from Erica Sadun's ftp server and put it in /usr/bin on the iPhone, changing the permissions to make it executable. Then I put the necessary shell commands in a script, hoping to make the process of creating the right settings at least reasonably quick.

Next, I looked for a way to launch that shell script from Springboard, but it seems difficult. I ended up using Erica's doshell.app, downloaded from this place. In the included script file doit.sh I put the following commands:

Code:

---

#! /bin/sh
plutil -s MusicShuffleSetting -v Off /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mobileipod.plist
plutil -s MusicPreferedShuffleOnSetting -v Albums /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mobileipod.plist
plutil -s MusicShuffleSetting -v Albums /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mobileipod.plist
exit

---

I renamed the folder doshell.app to Albumshuffle.app, copied that to the iPhone in /Applications, and set the permissions to executable.

This now works: I have an icon on Springboard that sets the music player to Album Shuffle. (Sometimes I have to turn shuffle on and off again after using this, but that's not a problem). However, it is even less elegant than the solution I posted earlier (which turned out not to be so good). The script doesn't run in the background; you actually get to see the lines and have to press Home to get out of it.

Does anyone know of a way to launch a shell script from Springboard and have it run in the background?

I never used iPhone to play songs but yesterday after downloading some songs into iphone 1.0.2 in usual way using iTune I saw shuffle sign at the top in the songs list . This means shuffle is working and don't need to do anything. What is this story about bringing the shuffle to iphone?

ag:
This is about ALBUM - wise shuffle, so playing random full albums instead of random songs...

Ender

This is the last solution I am proposing... 3 should be enough.

Thanks to this blog post, I have been able to put the shuffle settings in the main Settings menu. This is on the 1.1.2 firmware (don't know about other versions). This is the process:

1. SSH'ed into the iPhone and downloaded /Applications/Preferences.app/Settings-iPhone.plist to my computer. EDIT: iPod Touch owners will have to use the file Settings-iPod.plist (from the same location).
2. Put the file through http://140.124.181.188/%7Ekhchung/cgi-bin/plutil.cgi for conversion from binary to text format
3. Opened the resulting file in a text editor and, below line 185 (right after the block of text about iPodSettings), inserted this block of text:
   
   Code:

   ---

   <dict>
    <key>cell</key>
    <string>PSLinkListCell</string>
    <key>detail</key>
    <string>PSListItemsController</string>
    <key>label</key>
    <string>Shuffle music</string>
    <key>icon</key>
    <string>Settings-Display.png</string>
    <key>defaults</key>
    <string>com.apple.mobileipod</string>
    <key>key</key>
    <string>MusicPreferedShuffleOnSetting</string>
    <key>validTitles</key>
    <array>
        <string>No shuffle</string>
        <string>Shuffle songs</string>
        <string>Shuffle albums</string>
    </array>
    <key>validValues</key>
    <array>
        <string>Off</string>
        <string>Songs</string>
        <string>Albums</string>
    </array>
</dict>

   ---

4. Saved and put the file back in its place on the iPhone.

I now have a settings option right under the iPod submenu in the Settings. (It would be more logical to have it in the iPod submenu, but then, it would have been more logical for Apple to include this setting by default and allow it to survive reboots...)

How to use Album Shuffle with this setting
After the procedure described above, it works like this:

• Start the music player
• Hit Home, hit Settings, hit Shuffle music, select Shuffle albums
• Go back to the music player, tap the album cover once to bring up the progress bar, tap the shuffle icon on its right side to turn off shuffle (if it's on) and then to turn it (back) on -- this serves to build a new temporary playlist based on the new shuffle setting.

Every time the Music Player starts, it resets the shuffle setting to Songs. This happens after restarting Springboard or rebooting the phone, not when the player has just not been making music for a while (because then it's still running). This behaviour is why I need to start the music player before changing the setting.

Please, Apple, make this a 'normal' setting in firmware 1.1.3.

I changed view in iTune to shuffle view and was expecting after sync to see the same view on iPhone but I didn't. I realised shuffle is inactive and I can't turn it on. I just realised what is the whole story of shuffle problem about. Shuffle is non active because we have jailbrocken phone. Am I right?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ag_oo7

I changed view in iTune to shuffle view and was expecting after sync to see the same view on iPhone but I didn't. I realised shuffle is inactive and I can't turn it on. I just realised what is the whole story of shuffle problem about. Shuffle is non active because we have jailbrocken phone. Am I right?

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In fact, some iPhone owners have complained about the missing album-shuffle on Apple's official feedback site. I don't think they are jailbroken... The function is simply hidden.