iRiver h340 shuffle

I've got an iRiver h340, but it has some issues with the shuffle mode, especially in conjunction with resume.

Firstly, I have the latest firmware (v1.29 K) which is meant to fix the dodgy shuffle. It doesn't!!! The thing now chooses from a set of about four songs for the first in the shuffle list, and then goes from there. It also has its favourites, so some of my songs never get played. I currently have about 80 hours of music on there, so I should NOT be hearing four songs today which I heard yesterday.

I have resume on, so I stop the player at the end of one day and then the next day it starts up at the same part of the same song (and if I am in one in the same playlist). Problem is, I think it is resetting the shuffle, using the current song as the seed.

My question is: is there a way to fix this?

I would consider Rockbox, but I don't know how stable it is, and I have album art in the tags, which I think crashes Rockbox. Also, Rockbox uses more battery in a given time.

Any suggestions? I'm getting seriously bummed by the lack of variety.

I should add that although I seriously consider returning the unit (it's only six months old and I would consider this a malfunction), I also use it as portable storage for photos when I'm away. As far as I know, no other player will connect directly with my camera (or with a card reader) as the iRiver will. If there is one, then I'm interested (so long as it has enough capacity and battery life).

hmmmn iriver is good stuff one of my favs perhaps ya mp3s are not all encoded corect try to reenedode em maybe unless ya know rthere all encoded thwe same

I have the H120 and iFP-795t, and I have never had that problem. I have had a few minor bugs, but I emailed iRiver support, and they were incredibly helpful, even passing along a few suggestions to the firmware dev team.

Perhaps you can use a program to create a random playlist (I know they exist, but I can't remember the names), and play that playlist on your iRiver? A little inconvenient, but it'd work...

I have an iriver 850 or some such number. My shuffle mode is not that bad but it does repeat a fair number of songs. It is a trivial programming problem to shuffle as many songs as you want and play it through without repeating.
I suspect that instead they use a pseudo-random number of some sort. You would expect a certain amount of repeats in that case, but only four or so tells me there is something wrong.

This is the only thing I don't like about my iRiver, the shuffle function is lame. I've got a 899 and it's been the same through several iterations of firmware. I also noticed that the US versions of the firmware have limited your ability to adjust the bit rate for line recording. That really hacked me off since I use mine for catching an audio feed in the studio. Fortunately there are other firmware versions out there that will still allow it to be changed.

If you like the rest of the feature set then you are stuck with the shuffle as I am. I've even written to them about it but they were none too receptive.

-LT

lol ill trade ya for a ipod nano it has great shuffle lol im just kidding ya iriver is a million times btter im sure ya will resolve the issue.i dont like the eu firmware on irviers though it makes it to quiet.i always used to ums firmware