And don’t pet the sweaty stuff. :eek:
Actually, it may be perfectly random.
You can never prove that a random number generator for a range of, say, 5000, isn’t working just fine just because it’s only emitting “1” while you’re watching.
You just have to be patient. You take it on faith, you take it to the heart; the waiting is the hardest part.
Damn. Looks like “shuffle” got stuck on Tom Petty again.:mad:
I’d find a Mazda forum and search out discussions about the stereo. Both car forums I belong to have lengthy threads discussing the stereo, what players work best, and good aftermarket options. If you can’t find a good solution and if your car has Bluetooth you might also consider moving your music to a device with that interface. Then (I think) it would still be the device doing the randomizing (assuming it works better than the car) and the car just picks up and plays the signal.
As mentioned above, the random selection is performed after each song and therefore each song has the same chance to be played next…except the random algorithm is using a seed that has a high repetition factor.
To properly implement a random algorithm that users are expecting to hear, a playlist should be built using all the files only once and the playlist played sequentially. Some music players do this, but obviously not the ones in cars…ours has a high repeat factor as well.
Most mp3 shuffle algorithms do choose with replacement, rather than choose without replacement. That significantly reduces the apparent randomness of song play.
My stereo (well really the iPod Classic) appends track numbers to randomized songs, so after a long drive I can be on track #226. If I go back, it will replay the same songs again. This makes me think that it is not doing replacement. The only times it has played the same thing on the same run is if I have two copies (say from a compilation and the original album). I can’t verify because, see above. It has played the original right before/after a cover before.
I thought that the iPod had a feature that counted the times you actually listened to a complete song and took that into consideration when it did random play. Maybe you are stuck in that mode.
I certainly feel Boyo Jim’s pain. I too have fought this battle (~2014) and succumbed, but now want to open it back up again. Like Jim, I want names. My high-end ($1,100!) nav-head Alpine (circa 2014) has similar issues. To add insult to injury, I had been using a Garmin GPS with media play since 2005 that does a perfectly fine job of randomizing songs, and, yes, you can reverse backwards through the play list. The tap into my Ford’s CAN bus was a bit difficult, but I was ultimately able to get hands free phone and true random music play through my stock Ford stereo. It is funny to me that a company that is focused on navigation absolutely kicked ass on than a company that is focusee on music entertainment! Let me emphasize that my Garmin device was 10 years older than the Alpine device, go figure! Annnnnd, in 2014, know that the high-end Kenwood nav-head couldn’t even random play, which is why I bought the Alpine.
My feeling on this subject is that I should be able to jump in my car and have a fresh music lineup each time without touching a thing or resorting to any auxiliary MP3 player or my phone. It seems it should resume playing a pre-existing random playlist that is only regenerated when I choose to push random again. In the meantime, it continues to a truly randomly generated list that just resumes each time I jump in the car (my Garmin did exactly this).
And, no excuses, the algorithm is not that difficult. Just seed it with date and time and you will get a unique list every time, jeeeesh!
Again, please name names and let us know who (what stereo company) has solved this problem (other than Garmin unless they are now committed to and selling car multi-media systems!).
The way “random” is implemented in most soft/hardware is just not very good.
You’d be better off “randomly” renaming all files on your computer and playing that list alphabetically.
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Music shuffle uses a random number generator to determine which songs to play.
A random number generator will never be truely random. They require algorithms to work, and numbers generated by an algorithm will always have some kind of pattern to them.
While it’s true that computers will never generate truly random numbers, they can still be very, very good at generating pseudorandom numbers. If you’re trying to use cryptography to protect valuable secrets, then yeah, you probably want to shell out the cash for some specialized piece of hardware that produces true random numbers, but for just getting a good variety on a car stereo, unless the programmers were complete idiots (a possibility which can’t be ruled out), it’ll be plenty random enough. In fact, you’re far more likely to have a problem with it being too random, because humans really suck at randomness, and so what we think “sounds random” is very different from the real thing.
I have a USB that is customized for this type of entertainment fun - it is a single folder playlist, with the metadata customized to the band name being no more than 8 letters and the song title no more than 12 positions. To be honest, they are mainly an aide memoire if someone asks me what is playing. The 200 songs are effectively my favorite driving music playlist. If I want something specific, I have another stick that has most of everything else I ave, and one that is all my audiobooks. [I have accidentally shuffled the audiobook one. I ended up with a chapter of Suetonius Lives of the Romans, a chapter of Agent of Change by Sharon Lee, a chapter of Pratchett’s Mort and a chapter of Bujold’s A Civil Campaign. As I was moderatly tired at the time [really long driving day] it ended up being a fairly existential experience.
I can’t imagine why song randomization is so popular.
Because when you have tens of thousands of songs, you can’t and shouldn’t be picking individual songs while driving. Or even when safety is not a concern, sometimes you need a soundtrack for whatever you are doing.
That’s an argument for playlists, though, not one for randomized playlists specifically. You could accomplish the same goal by, for instance, playing an entire album at once (and if your drive is longer than an hour, you can take a two-minute break to load up another one and stretch your legs).
Obviously, the reason why people hit “random” instead of doing this is just that they prefer it that way. Why? I don’t know that either; I like hearing a whole album at once.
I could never get the random shuffling to work properly on my devices with thousands of songs. So I chose a different tactic: I play them in alphabetical order by song title. Not by artist or by album title, but by song title. This mixes them up enough so that they sound random, yet every song gets played.
I use a dedicated Sony portable music player, which gives me certain functionalities that my smartphone may not provide (such as a lyrics display, very important for me). I mainly do random because of the fun combinations that then result (a la aruvqan’s audiobook experience). I might get say The Verve’s All in the Mind, then the Moody Blues’ Legend of a Mind…
Since I started this thread I feel obliged to do an update.
I have a new Mazda with a new player since the first post. It does a much better job with no more Tom Petty fixation. I can no longer say that the shuffle mode sucks. However, sometimes after it’s been switched off and restarted, it changes to another folder, or to another play mode like “repeat one song eternally.” So I have to switch folders or change play modes or both.
Yet another theory:
Almost all programmers, especially ones on limited capability hardware, don’t put much thought into things like doing RNG properly. They grab some 50 year old thing and throw it in without thinking because it’s easy to find, small and fast.
But even bad old RNGs need good seeds. And lazy programmers are even more likely to completely ignore generating a good seed. Check out the problems with the classic middle-square method. So forget generating good seeds.
The result? Very short cycles and such.
Doing things right is fairly easy. But “fairly easy” is too much work for many people.
Chiming in here with my personal experience.
We have a civic and an accord. We have had a Pioneer DEH-X8600BT radio installed in the civic for more than 3 years where I play music off of an iphone 3GS that is connected via USB. I use itunes to sync my songs to the iphone. I always use the same play mode of Random All in the civic. The radio coupled with the iphone does a very good job at randomizing all songs. I have never played music off of a USB stick in the civic. Considering I am in Canada, it gets cold during the winter causing the iphone’s battery to die constantly because I keep the iphone in the car at all times (connected to the radio via USB.) The iphone will start once charged (normally after 10 minutes of driving.) It will play the same song once the iphone has booted but all I need to do is select the random option and it will randomize all the songs very well. During the summer time, I don’t have this issue because the battery stays alive. This means that the iphone will continue playing from the last track and proceed to the next track. I really like the random feature because it’s annoying to hear the same song multiple times when you have 13 gigs of music.
My accord does not randomize songs very well with my current setup. I installed a JVC KD-R97MBS in the accord 72 hours ago. I filled a 32 Gb usb stick with 7 folders of music totalling ~4000 songs in total. Any usb connected to this radio is rated to handle a Maximum # of 999 Folders, 999 Files/folder and 20,480 files in total. Clearly, my radio is not able to access all of the songs on the USB due to these Max limits because some folders have >1000 songs. My problem is even though, 95% of the mp3s are songs & the rest are Stand up sets/audiobook mp3s, I am hearing my stand up/audiobook mp3s 40% of the time compared to my songs and I am hearing certain songs more often than others. I have noticed that the songs I hear more often are normally sitting alone in a folder by themselves. It’s possible that JVC’s random feature will play the next song in the next folder and then continue to the next song in the next folder. Please note that I also eliminated any duplicate files on the usb stick using Duplicate Cleaner.
Considering I only installed the radio 72 hours ago, I still need more time to test why the random all function has been so bad in the accord compared to the civic but I think if you use an old ipod/iphone connected to the radio via USB, you may be able to get a better user experience when enabling Random All songs with an iphone.
I’m responding to a 2 year old post, but this is incorrect. When you shuffle a deck of cards and deal them, you don’t get repeats, because once you deal a card it’s no longer in the deck, and thus no longer available. A truly random shuffle of songs would work the same way. Mix up the “deck” and play them one at a time. Once the song has played, it’s no longer available until the “deck” is exhausted and reshuffled.
Since it doesn’t work this way on any player I’m aware of, it’s really a misnomer to call it shuffle mode. It’s just picking a song at random from the entire library each time.