MP3 Player Shuffle

[Jon Light (deceased)]

Not a Ray Price shuffle. Maybe a Brooklyn shuffle.

I use my non-iPod player almost exclusively in the shuffle mode. With almost 8 meg of music on it it's like listening to a great, great radio station.
But the 'random' shuffle is very non-random---in any twenty songs I will usually have three from one album or artist. I've deleted all content and tried to reorganize my computer files by various means----alphabetizing song titles seemed like a good idea---and reloaded the unit but the same thing happens.
This is totally not an important issue but it puzzles me. Anybody find the same thing?

[Matthew Walton]

What I do with my ipod and I'm sure it would work with yours too is organize my playlist by song title, so there is some amount of order, but there isn't in my case say, 12 Beatles CD's in a row. the only problem is when you have 10 songs that start with "Texas" all by the same artist, but it doesn't happen very often.

[b0b]

I'm really impressed with the iPod's shuffle algorithm. It appears to organize by genre first. It usually plays two random songs from one genre, then picks another genre and plays two from it, etc. Since I like a lot of different styles of music, this works really well for me.

[Jon Light (deceased)]

Interesting. I have always liked djs who did that two song thing, whether by genre or by artist. The first one whets the appetite for another, then you move on.
I haven't delved into the creation of playlists yet. Right now everything is just loaded in in bulk and can be called up by title, artist, album, genre and maybe more sub-categories. Or just shuffled. I can find no rhyme or reason to how it forms up the shuffle list. But it never fails to deliver, in one given hour, 4 Hag songs out of 15, in another hour 4 Muddy Waters, in another hour 4 Beatles, etc.

I did try playing all the songs in alphabetic order and that did present the 'Texas' syndrome. Not really a problem. But what bothered me was knowing that there were some great songs starting with T, W, Y that I wouldn't get to hear for a month.....that's why I love random. I'm also digging my Bluetooth headphones with a button on them so that I can instantly move on to the next song if I'm not in the mood (for Strange Fruit, for instance....there's a time and a place for everything and it is often not the time or place for that one).

[John Cipriano]

Short version:
The only thing that might be available to you is to check if there are firmware updates available for your player. Otherwise, there's really nothing that can be done.

Boring version:
Computers by their nature can't produce random numbers. So they use what are called pseudorandom number generators, algorithms that take a seed number and produce a new number as output. A large group of these outputs will have close to the same distribution as a real random set. Desktop computers, being more powerful, have better algorithms, and some motherboards have hardware generators which use real-world events to seed the algorithm (a clock, or temperature, or timing of network packets, etc). MP3 players are not especially great at generating random numbers.

[Jon Light (deceased)]

Thanks for that, John. I had always thought that tic tac toe and random generating were the kind of things that computers ate for lunch. I had an unnatural dose of James Brown and Bob Dylan today. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

[b0b]

Just remember, coincidences are random events too. Randomizing doesn't guarantee variety. A random number generator picking from ten items could give any of the following:

1 2 3 4 5
2 2 2 2 2
9 8 7 6 5
2 4 6 8 10

These are all valid random sequences! Any combination of numbers is a likely as any other.

[Jon Light (deceased)]

Absolutely, b0b---this I do understand. But I have no doubt that you would furrow your brow as I do when 15 of the 60 songs I heard today were either songs I heard yesterday or artist-repeats----this from an 8 gig stash and this being a daily pattern. Correct me if I'm wrong--at 3 meg per song, that's, like, over 2000 songs? Is that right? I've got to check that out. I might be dropping a zero there....