Well, it may be randomizing the list (minus whatever song is in its current memory from last time) each time you fire up the engine. Since you’re probably not in your car for 5,000 songs worth of driving at a shot, it’s more like shuffling a deck of cards and drawing the top ten, then doing that a hundred more times and looking at the distribution. It’s legitimately shuffling but no one is sitting through the entire randomized shuffle.
Anyway, I only have about 1,000 songs on my stick (I’m such a scrub) but found it useful to have four folders of 250 songs each rather than bloating a single folder or two. Sometimes it sounds less than random but I assume that’s largely a matter of confirmation bias and a tendency to skip past less favorable/“not in the mood” songs so I artificially mess with the songs I am hearing.
Now that we are 5 years or more down the road from the last discussion, has anyone found a stereo brand that actually plays your songs in a truly random order from a USB stick?
I always wondered if there wasn’t something about the metadata or tags that favored some songs or artists, anybody? Or, maybe they just use the same sample of songs during each restart? Certainly seems they could preserve the random list and delve further and further after each restart and ensure that no one song is played twice.
I’m still using my 2014 Alpine, I just hit random a lot. Changing the song list by adding or removing even a single song does change things up, but then the stereo has a new set of favorites that it plays almost every (not every) time I get in the truck. Despite being versed in math, stats, programming, and a long-time professional engineer, I am totally baffled. There is no way it is random. I certainly believe it is due to an initial token draw of songs despite trying to change up the number of songs and folders. Maybe the tags are at play? I wish I could find the engineer at Alpine that wrote or borrowed the code (since it seems fairly prevalent among brands), so he or whoever could explain its pseudo “randomness”. I have personally written randomizer algorithms that work a hell of lot better than these stereo jokesters are using!
I once upon a time contemplated getting a 5-disc CD player - 5 discs in a circle on one tray. (Remember when that would be such a cool thing?) But reading the fine print, I discovered “shuffle” would actually select a random disc and then play that entire disc, not shuffle all 5 discs’ songs. It kind of made sense, switching CD’s for each song would make an appreciable pause. But that wasn’t what I expected from random, so I gave up on the idea.