Itunes has a feature that allows individual songs to be marked as ‘skip when shuffle’ . This means the song is included when the album is play in track order, but when the olay mode is shuffle acoss the songs in all of the albums in the library, it is skipped. A useful feature, but i cant find a corresponding idv2.x tag. Any ideas please?
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I would expect you have answered this yourself in the first few words. That is potentially being kept in the iTunes library itself.
If Picard does not show it, then I assume it is not a tag in the music file.
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Hey @dpr,
I agree it’s a useful feature; it would be nice to see it in more players. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can embed in your files that will make every player exclude them from shuffled play.
@IvanDobsky guessed right: When you tick the “Skip when shuffling” box in iTunes, it saves that change in your iTunes library (ITL) file, not your audio files. I haven’t used iTunes in a while, but I’m pretty sure the setting is a boolean value called ExcludeFromShuffle. (Apparently, in the iPod database it’s called IPOD_SKIP_WHEN_SHUFFLING.)
If you export your library or playlists, you can probably find the setting in one of the XML files iTunes creates. Some music software can import iTunes XML directly, but I don’t know of any that also support skip-when-shuffling. The best player I know of for smart shuffling is Quod Libet. It can’t import iTunes XML, but it can exclude specific tracks based on tags or ratings.
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Thanks for the feedback.
My situation is slightly complicated. I live in a apple / android split family. So we play music on both families of phones and tablets. So the ‘master’ library is outside of both universes ie iTunes and google land. Music has been ripped from cds and is encoded to a variety of formats including flac and mp3. Tagging is done at the encoding time (not with iTunes, Picard or anything else). iTunes is only involved to get music onto the apple devices. (If there is a better player than the native player apple it would be nice to know. I haven’t checked if Quod Libet is available… )
Hope this background explains why I’m reluctant to add any metadata in iTunes… and why I was asking about idv2 tag support for ‘skip when shuffle’… maybe it was a mistake to post in the Picard forum, but I couldn’t see one for idv2 tags.
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Adding the tags to the files would only be your first step as you’d need to get both the Android and Apple players to read the tag and use it. The tag would be the “easy” bit, getting the players changed to read that tag would be a lot harder.
Yeah this is very common issue I guess