Party Shuffle Does Not Work

by any chance, do you have "crossfade playback" enabled in your itunes Playback preferences tab?

if so, by way of experiment, try switching crossfade playback off. do you get more standard behavior from your Party Shuffle now?

Does the same problem occur when you download your songs onto your ipod?

replying to Luke Hightshue

when i turn on the crossfade my songs end instead of moving on to the next song in the party shuffle can this be fixed?

not sure. i've only picked up on the crossfade playback connection myself over the past few days. but we can check on a few things.

what "source" and "display" settings do you have engaged currently down at the bottom of your Party Shuffle screen?

Thank you very much for the tip about the crossfade - it works! I have been going mad.

Hello again b. noir--My party shuffle advances to the next song with crossfade turned on--is this a fluke? My problem with party shuffle is that it no longer truly pulls songs from my entire library (I have source set to Music)--instead it is only playing recently played songs (over and over!). I find this quite annoying, because I have over 30,000 songs in my library and party shuffle was my way of rediscovering gems that I had forgotten about. Now it's pretty useless to me. Could there be a bug in party shuffle or was it rewritten to feature recently played/favorites?

Is there any way to tweak the way party shuffle chooses songs?

Thanks! sdm

It seems some people have problems with crossfade and and others don't.

Is there any way to tweak the way party shuffle chooses songs?
Yes. At the bottom of party shuffle, you pick the playlist you want to use for your music.

I'd like to update my original message--after reading through this thread--I decided to play with the settings at the bottom of my party shuffle screen. I changed the display to "0" for recently played songs (it was set at 5). Once I did this, I too lost my ability to advance to the next song just like everybody else here, hmmm. Why is this???

Anyway, the good news is that I got back my true party shuffle feature. (lose/win????) Anyway, I too just turned off the crossfade option and party shuffle is humming along.

Does crossfade conflict with gapless playback?

Thanks for trying to help, but my source was set to "music" so it should have been pulling from my whole library and not just recently played songs. This feature "music" (pulling songs from my entire library) is working again, but crossfade was important to me and it doesn't work right now. (Sigh!)

There definitely is a bug in party shuffle--it's pulling from my music again, but I can't crossfade songs. I truly liked the crossfade feature when I was running iTunes on party shuffle as background music--there was never a space between songs--now I have lots of gaps--yuch!

When it is set to 0, there is no "next song" to advance to.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304362
"Gapless playback is always on in iTunes 7 or later unless the Crossfade feature is turned on. If Crossfade is on, only audio files that have the "Part of a gapless album" option checked and are capable of being played gaplessly will play with no gaps:"

The "show previous songs" setting was changed from 5 to 0, once I did this, it got out of the rut of only choosing previously played songs. Crossfade no longer works, but now I'm getting a legitimate "shuffle" or crap-shoot if you will of songs from my library. (This truly makes me happy!) I changed the "show previous songs" back to 5 because I like the ability to go back and check what just played incase I'm not near my computer when the song is playing. I like to make a mental note of songs I like but haven't heard for awhile.

Anyway, for me, the bottom line is that party shuffle is working properly again selecting random songs from throughout my library--but I want the crossfade feature back for party shuffle. I have a wireless music bridge and during parties I send iTunes to my stereo via this bridge. I generally run iTunes on Party Shuffle and the results have been quite wonderful. However, dead space between songs is a downer! I liked crossfade--there was never silence!

I meant when Show upcoming songs is set to 0, not show previously played songs.

I know you did--and I've always left that setting alone--from the beginning until now it's set at 15.

Bottom line, gapless playback and crossfade are not playing well together. I can understand this--it has to be complicated. I got used to a seamless party music background--now I may have to accept music-gap-music-gap, etc. Some songs still run together well--it truly depends upon how much dead space is at the end (or beginning) of a song. Oh well, for me personally I pick a true working party shuffle feature (I love this aspect of iTunes) over crossfade. But, if I could have everything then I'd want the ability to crossfade songs again for a party without having to concoct a multi-hour playlist.