I don’t know if this is a universal problem, but I’m in a carpool and the problem happens in one form or another in all 3 cars – a Chevy, a Toyota and my own Mazda.
The problem is that random shuffle … isn’t. In my car, though there are several thousand tracks on the drive, the player chooses about 2 dozen seemingly random songs, and then goes for its favorite – Tom Petty. It plays every Tom Petty song I have, then goes back to some random tracks, then plays every Tom Petty song I have, etc.
The other vehicles don’t have a Tom Petty fixation, but they have their own issues, which is that they will only cycle through a few dozen songs and repeat them, though they have thousands of tracks to choose from.
So my best guess is that the stereos just can’t cope with those large numbers of songs in a drive folder. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Also, does anyone know of a 3rd party stereo specifically designed to address this issue? Right now I’m avoiding it by running my iPod headphone outlet into my stereo aux in, but it’s not a satisfactory permanent fix. I’d like to replace the stereo but I want to do with some confidence that some design issue won’t give me the same problem.
No. The problem, I think, is that there are maybe 3,000 tracks in the one folder.
I looked at some other sites, and this is apparently a very common problem. The reasons for it seem to boil down to two main ones; a poor shuffling algorithm, or insufficient memory to maintain a list of the tracks to shuffle (which is more or less what I was thinking), or both.
Unfortunately I haven’t seen a single piece of information about specific models of stereos that are designed to fix this.
Your car stereo has become self-aware and likes Tom Petty. Seriously, I used to own a ten-disc CD changer which did this, except its favorite was Robert Plant. It didn’t matter which slot the CD was in, the stereo would always play the hell out of the Plant CD once it found it. Freakishly, if I replaced Robert Plant with something else, it would refuse to select that disc at all – as if the stereo was “pouting” or something.
I’ve noticed this does happen a lot. Whether its pr0n clips or music files, having lots of them in the shuffle folder will cause the program to select “favorites” which always come up, while the others get ignored. Adding or deleting mp3s or pr0n will usually change the program’s list of favorites, though some files always get lost in the shuffle. The reason is probably as you say, a poor shuffling algorithm – it’s well known that computers have a difficult time doing anything that’s completely random.
There’s a common fallacy that a truly random shuffle would tend to play each and every track at roughly the same frequency. This isn’t true. Instead, you get a bell curve. A few tracks are almost never played, a few get played a LOT, and most fall somewhere in the middle. I remember reading somewhere that Apple had to tweak their iPod algorithm to get a shuffle that was actually less random, but which “felt” more correctly random.
Now, it sounds like whatever is going on with your car stereo is a defect beyond just this simple fact, but I like the fact, and so I pass it on.
I had one of the early DVD players that could also play MP3s from a data CD. However, there was a limitation on the length of the file name, and any file over this limit would never be played. I was using iTunes to rip the files from CDs, and it would build the file name from the artist, song title, album, and track number, so many of them were over the limit.
Could it be that your Tom Petty files have shorter file names that are under a limit?
I noticed this on a very long trip I took in a late model Nissan pathfinder. It’s system had the ability to control an IPOD. I set it to play random songs from the IPOD (I assumed that the IPOD contained the randomizing element but it could have been the Pathfinder’s system in control).
The IPOD had 930 musical selections on it. Less than 50 of them were from stand up comedy albums. It had a variety of Blues, Rock, Country, Hard Rock, and Metal on it.
In the span of 30 hours of listening time it played every one of the comedy clips, some twice. It never once selected a song from the Heavy Metal list. It seemed to love anything by comedian Kathleen Madigan, Joe Bonamassa and the one friggin Christmas album accidentally left on the IPOD.
It played two songs off of 7 Clapton albums. One hard rock Album by Halestorm was untouched.
Near the end of the trip it got to be a game for us to recall missed albums that we knew were on the IPOD.
I have an iPod Classic with… 13,730 songs and everything is random. The stereo is an aftermarket Sony. When it does a weird trend I’m pretty sure that it is being random.
Are the songs on a particular playlist? Also, which Petty songs? It wouldn’t happen to be the same album? When my stereo ends a playlist, it always plays “Here Comes the Sun.” And that’s because it defaults to sorting by album and Abbey Road is the highest alphabetically.
I had the bright idea of getting a very large USB flash drive for cheap and putting every digital song I have onto it rather than leaving an ipod in the glove box. My 2014 Subaru’s factory stereo plays about fifty of the 4000 songs on the memory stick. I think the stereo unit either can’t read some (most?) of the files or the algorithm is not very good.
Also, when its in RANDOM ALL mode it can’t go back to the previous song. If you press the track back button it replays the current song from the beginning. You can only skip ahead.
I’m using an iPod touch that I bought last summer 2014. I believe it was the latest version.
I was using a flash drive in my car but it the stereo firmware would only do a limited amount (It could read 64 GB flash but truncated the file list). I could only listen artists alphabetically below the letter “M”
The nice thing about the iPod connection was that the car’s stereo could access menus so I could select by artist, album, song list, or genre. It even displayed the cover art on the navigation panel.
It is a great system with the exception of the random feature. Given the fact that it’s trying to randomize nearly 1000 selections its not surprising that it comes out weird.
I think the limitation is usually the number of files per folder that the system can “see”…sometimes restructuring the folder system can make things work a little better.
If there’s a limit on the number of files it can handle, a certain amount of files are essentially invisible to the stereo, so it won’t include those in the random mix.
Here’s an example from a Sony aftermarket stereo:
So it might not see certain folders if you have too many, and it might not see certain files in a folder if you have too few folders.
I’ve got (presumably) that same radio in my Subie and gawd is the USB music interface terrible. However, I know that at least with the 500-odd songs I’ve got on my thumb drive it is shuffling through all of them only because the folder browsing interface is so goddawful that if I want to listen to something specific I just put it on random and click forward until it comes up. It always eventually does although it does seem like it hangs out in a specific artist sometime.
I do have a hare-brained completely unfounded theory that the random function on that and other car stereos will only jump a certain number of folders at a time which might tend to keep the same artist coming up. So if you’ve got, like 200 albums on the drive and 10 of them are Tom petty but the random function will only jump 5-10 folders per time, it might keep jumping around close to the Tom Petty ones until it randomly moseys down to somewhere else. But, again, completely unfounded and I have no idea why it would work that way that if it in fact did.
The correct answer was described by Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman in Good Omens where the demon Crowley noted that every cassette left in the car stereo eventually mutated into Best of Queen. It didn’t matter what cassette was loaded - they all eventually suffered the same fate. iPODs are subject to the same laws of causation, entropy and damnation as cassettes, so all tracks eventually mutate into whatever 70’s classic rock anthem that is the animating spirit of your car.
I’ve noticed that my Android music player has been playing a lot of tracks from a set of albums, along with some more random stuff. The albums themselves move in and out of the playlist.
This behavior began after an update of the app.
I can speculate that the programmers decided that once you heard one song on an album, you really want to hear other songs it reminds you of, so that your happiness with the app will increase if this happens more often than chance.
I’d love to hear from someone who actually codes this stuff.
On an old Sony music player I had, the shuffle was set in stone. On this one it is dynamically done - if you go back and then go forward you get different songs.
