I use Amazon Music on my iPhone. When I listen to my music I always hit “shuffle”. But it seems like I hear the same songs over and over - just in a different order. There are songs on my play list that I never hear. Is there someway to fix this?
The short answer is I do not think so.
The longer answer follows:
How many songs are in your playlist?
While there are no completely random generators, they seem to do a pretty good job at shuffling the songs. You can of course always look at the current order of the songs.
I have a play list of my top 18 songs that gives me just a bit over an hour of play and that is about how long it takes to get home, so I usually hear them all.
I have another play list that has 125 songs (including those 18), it is over 9 hours of play and I found that I did not hear my favorite songs enough (sometimes I would hear the same song during that hour and sometimes not), but some songs I never heard (in the few days I was using this full play list).
My gut feeling is that there are songs (even in my favorite 18) that I get ‘tired’ of hearing as often, and other songs that I think I could hear them daily and not get tired of them. So when one of the ones I get more tired of, comes on, I might skip it or notice it more, than the songs that I love, yeah seems sort of counter intuitive but I think with songs I love, sometimes I might be more focused on other things and no even realize they are playing, whereas with the less favorite of the favorite songs, I might wake up from my daze and say 'nah, I am not in the mood for this one right now. The effect being that some I notice more than others.
To do anything different than just shuffle would seem to imply that you could rank the songs, which seems like you have done that by nature of putting them in your playlist. There is no thumbs up in a playlist, only on the stations.
I have one playlist that has 381 songs and another with 87. I guess maybe I should break them out into more playlists. I do a lot of skipping hoping something I haven’t heard for awhile will come up!
I use Amazon Music on an Android (LG G5) and found their shuffling algorithm to be lacking. I have never tried to plot it but I will typically get a few songs, and then start to get songs on the same albums as the first 5-6 songs. There is a small chance of this happening randomly but it’s a common pattern when I start a new “shuffle.” I suspect they have a pseudo-random number generator that produces discernible patterns. I do not know how these are written but I would imagine they index all the songs then randomize the indices, and I would guess that songs on the same album are indexed together. So if, for example, the algorithm simply adds a number to each index to get the next, it could cycle around depending on the number of songs you have (like 567, 1029, 2015, 569, 1031, 2017…).
I don’t really know what’s going on but my point is that I don’t think their randomness algorithm is suitable for this particular purpose.