iPhone Skipping Songs

I don't hear any tones when a song is skipped (on my playlists); I don't know if there is such a sound-effect with shake-to-shuffle, since I've never used it. The main way I notice is either when an unexpected song comes next (on an album that I know really well), or by going back later and looking at the last played times in iTunes.

I have not had any problems playing an album straight from my library, nor (so far as I've noticed) on smart playlists that do not feature live updates.

If you're having this behavior when shake-to-shuffle is apparently turned off, that suggests to me that the shuffle setting did not really take effect. Perhaps "rebooting" (by holding down the sleep/wake switch) would make a difference (although that shouldn't really be necessary).

OK, I tested shake-to-shuffle and it does play a couple of tones each time it reshuffles.

I didn't have any difficulty turning this feature back off, however, so if you're hearing those tones when the feature is supposed to be off something's wrong.

I was having the same issue, it was odd and seemed to only happen on songs that when on CD segue into each other (notably Tool's Lost Keys (Blame Hoffmann) and Rosetta Stoned). Shake to shuffle was off, so that was not the issue.

I then noticed that the shuffle button was lit blue. I turned shuffle off and it works as it should now.

I have a similar problem. I have a smart playlist (say, MyMusic) containing all of my music. I have created another smart playlist (All Music) based on the first and which additionally includes only those songs where Last Played is not in the last 3 weeks and Rating is greater than 1 star. Basically, I cannot play the All Music playlist and struggle playing the MyMusic playlist.

When I shuffle the All Music playlist, I see varying numbers of album covers flick by in cover flow and the Play symbol (the small triangle) in the top right flickers on and off. Very occasionally it will actually play a song (and if it starts it will complete it) but then struggle when selecting the next track to play. I also experience the same issues when simply selecting a track in the All Music playlist rather than shuffling.

I've tried basing All Music on the provided Music playlist with no improvement. I've also tried with Live Update on and then off with the same results.

This is proving incredibly frustrating and I only tried a smart playlist on a smart playlist because I'm unhappy with Apple's shuffling algorithm (I seemed to hear some songs significantly more often than others).

I also experience a similar issue as certain songs will not play, but here's something more specific that I hope someone can help me figure out:

I downloaded 2 albums and 3 songs (Alice in Chains and Nirvana) from iTunes via my iPhone 3G and they play just fine individually or in a playlist with those songs only (this means they should not be currupt files, right?) The problem is when I shuffle all songs or include those songs in a playlist with other albums - they just won't play at all unless I manually select them.

What I found to be very odd is that when I select all songs to play, not in shuffle, it'll display all songs (1 of 1223) and eventually play the songs in question...but when I select the shuffle icon, it'll change the song count to 1 of 1195...which removes the exact number of songs that were recently downloaded....

Any idea what my solution would be?

as a curiosity, can you check to see if the 'skip when shuffling' option is turned on? to check, select a file and go to "file -> get info". go to the "options" tab, and then see if that option is turned on. that may explain your issue.

I checked most of the songs in question...and there is no check mark under "skip when shuffling"...would've been happy if that were the case.

Any other suggestions?

the only songs it affected were my purchased song that i downloaded directly to my iphone. after i synced it everything worked fine. problem solved.

Same problem here:

Songs are skipped, even though shake to shuffle is turned off.

This happens only in playlist that do auto-update (such as "Where playcount = 0" or "not played in the last 3 months").

In some cases, I must say that I appreciate this strange behavior. However, it would be good if we could choose whether to have it or not.

I'm not an iPhone developer, but I'll bet this is what's going on.

In earlier versions of the iPhone software, smart playlists would update when the playlist was first opened, before it began to play.

In 3.0 and 3.0.1, the smart playlists appear to update after each song is played. This means that the iPhone refreshes the list and selects the next song to play at the same time.

Unfortunately, this sets up a race condition and every so often, the player will skip songs, and iPhone reports impossible situations, like announcing it is playing song "8 of 5."

Anyway, that's my guess.

Same problem here. Shake-to-suffle is off. It happens with downloaded to iPhone albums, iTunes Store albums and imported to iTunes albums. It is anoying. 😟

I've just update to 3.0.1 and the problem seems to be gone!!

My upgrading to 3.01 made no difference unfortunately. I did think about the race condition mentioned above but, in my experience, songs aren't marked as played until most of the song is played. (Feel free to correct me on this although it certainly appears that way to me.) The skipping on my iPhone happens before any of the song is played. And for me, it sometimes actually works for a few songs before screwing up.

My smart playlists works perfectly on the Mac - it's unfortunate that the same implementation seems not to have been used in the iPhone software.

The 3.0.1 upgrade did not solve the problem - but then, it wasn't really expected to (it was a security update for the SMS bug, not a general upgrade). As usual, we have no way of knowing whether the 3.1 update will solve it either, when it comes.