I was in college about 20 years ago, and had a large CD collection and too much time on my hands. I’m not sure what the genesis of the idea was, but I got it into my head that it would be pretty cool to listen to songs from my collection at random, instead of picking specific ones. What the iPod shuffle feature lets you do today.
Back then I kept all my CDs in cases – I had about 20 of them. Each case had three drawers, and each drawer held 14 CDs. I also had a calculator with a “random” function. If you hit it, it would give you a (probably pseduo) random number between 0 and 1, to 8 decimal places.
So the procedure was this:
Roundup (Random x 20) = the number of the CD case I went to
Roundup (Random x 3) = the drawer number of that CD case
Roundup (Random x 14) = the number of the CD in that drawer
Roundup (Random x number of songs on the CD) = the track I would play
Obviously, I’d have to grab the CD before executing Step 4.
And then I’d play that track. Regardless of what it was. No skipping – the calculator had spoken.
I understood that it didn’t provide the same probability for each song – for example, some CDs could have only a couple of tracks, others could have over 20. But it was good enough for me.
I’d spend hours doing this, much to the chagrin of my roommates.
I’m clearly not as smart or devoted as you, but I specifically bought carousel CD players (usually 5 disk) so I could shuffle through disks without having to constantly go back and forth to the player.
I didn’t go as far as that but when I was around 8-12 years old I would treat my CD playing as if I were a radio station, switching CDs after every song and playing a new one. It wasn’t shuffled though because of course I chose the songs before I played them… meaning this is potentially just an off-topic post.
“Obsessive-compulsive” is the term you’re looking for.
Now that you mention it, that might have been the genesis of the idea. I didn’t have a CD player with a disc changer, but several of my friends did. Perhaps I was trying to recreate and expand that experience.
My brother had a similar system in the eighties; he had six cases with LPs and I don’t know, a hundred records in each? So he threw a six sided dice to decide wich case, and two ten sided dice to determine wich album. And then, threw a twenty sided dice to determine which song to listen to on that album. – Yes, he did play role-playing games and the cases were full of heavy metal. Great system.
I respect that position. And there are clearly albums whose songs need to be heard together.
But I’ve found that the problem with that – at least for me – is that, when my collection got to be over a certain size, sometimes I won’t have the inclination to listen to one all the through. It will sit there, unlistened, and eventually I’ll kind of forget why I bought it in the first place.
One of the things I love about shuffling is when a fantastic song comes by that I haven’t heard in ages – maybe since I first bought it – it will be like a revelation – “I forgot all about that band/album – I forgot how good it was.” And then I’ll pick out the whole album and relisten to it.
That doesn’t happen every day, of course, but it happens enough.
Plenty of later-model CD players had some sort of shuffle functions, whether it was for a single CD, a bunch of CDs (shuffling between tracks on multiple discs) and later the ability to shuffle tracks on an MP# CD, which could hold a whole road trip’s worth of music.
I can see that. I have tons of music that I haven’t listened to in decades, and maybe 4 CDs in my regular rotation.
The new technology is giving me headaches, though. I’m currently working on a musical project that’s about 30 minutes of music in 15 short songs, and they are definitely written to be played in order. When it gets to market, you damn kids today are just going to shuffle it anyway.
I used to own a 100-disc Sony CD player. I left the CDs in there all the time and generally had it on random, unless I was listening to a musical cast album. Admittedly, me being me, that meant it usually WASN’T on shuffle.
Meet the MiniDisc. Developed in 1992, you could copy a whole CD onto them (or several tracks from many CDs), the disks couldn’t be scratched, the device fit in your pocket, you could split, join, and re-order tracks, as well as play in shuffle mode. Unfortunately, Japanese companies didn’t really try to sell them outside of Japan until MP3 players started to sell in the US.
I had a 60-disc CD changer in the 90’s. I could program it to randomly shuffle just a few CD’s in specific groups, or shuffle among all 60 CD’s in no particular order.
I bought a massive 200 disk cd changer and it had the worst randomizing algorithm in existence. Worst technology purchase…wait nm, I’ve made worse buys.
My Sansa has a shuffle mode, but it doesn’t really work. It plays some of the same songs in the same order and never plays others. People say that isn’t the case with IPODS but I’ve heard the same complaint before.
Everyone around here is very late to adopt technology. I’m pretty sure my first CD player had a random function, but I never used it. I’d be much more likely to use the program feature, and thus skip songs I didn’t like.
Sometimes, when I’m singing to myself, I sing an album all the way through (mandatory for Abbey Road or Thick As A Brick).
But usually, like most people, I shuffle all the songs I know.
Or, sometimes, I just shuffle a category like “Uplifting Broadway Finales”, or “Folkies of the 70s With Sticks Up Their Butts”, or “Titles That Use Apostrophes” – with a few exceptions: I don’t want to accidentally segue from “Truckin’” to “Havin’ My Baby”…
Hey, it keeps the mind alive while vacuuming or biking to the next town for coffee…
