Agreed. I too thought it wasn’t random so I did test it out. Turned out to be random. I was SURE it wasn’t at the time though. 
I don’t see it on my current version of iTunes, but I do remember being able to choose whether or not you wanted the shuffle function to be “more random” or “less random,” but they didn’t really bother to explain whether “more random” really meant less random in the sense of fewer repetitions or songs from the same artist back-to-back … and if they didn’t mean that, what the hell is more random than completely random?
It was “more or fewer songs from the same artist back-to-back” random. It was outlined in the help file, I think.
I did something similar. I have a “least-played favorites” smart playlist. It includes any song I’ve rated 4-5 stars that’s been played <5 times, as long as the genre doesn’t contain the word “Christmas.”
Since it’s set for dynamic updating, I can leave that list playing on the iPod on a long trip, and songs will start dropping off the list after the play count hits 5.
I’d be surprised if it wasn’t essentially purely random. I know I’ve played around in Visual Basic and C# (obviously as an Apple product the iPod wouldn’t utilize either of these languages), and at least in those languages objects of the Random class do appear to give results more or less what you would expect of a true random number. For example you can make a very basic “Coin Flip” or “Dice Throw” program and loop it 10,000 times and the distribution essentially matches what you would expect from “true random” numbers.
I do understand that “true random” as some sort of high-level mathematical concept (well above understanding from two semesters of calculus thirty years ago) can’t be entirely emulated by a computer but I believe that at least in .NET languages you can get a close enough approximation that for a layman’s every day usage it is essentially “random.”
I don’t know what iTunes or the iPod’s software are written in but I’d be surprised if they don’t have the same randomization capabilities (I could be wrong, I’m very much just a hobbyist when it comes to programming.)
This would actually be a pretty simple experiment. Create a playlist. Zero the play counts on the songs. Transfer it to an iPod. Set the iPod on shuffle, and let it play for a few days. Re-synch with the computer, and see if the songs all have reasonably similar play counts.
If you only shuffle once, you’ll get every song exactly once, and when you hit the end of the playlist, it’ll either stop or start over from the beginning. What you need to do is shuffle many times and take the play counts of the first 100 or so songs from each shuffle. That’s hard to do, so it’s better to simulate.
(One of the complications with people’s intuitive estimates is that nobody listens to exactly 100 songs every time they shuffle. The variable lengths make things a little tougher to reason about.)
Will you? I thought that’s what we were trying to figure out.
If it shuffles the whole playlist and plays through it, you get each song once.
If it plays a song and then randomly selects the next song, it can play 400 songs off of a list of 100 titles and still potentially not have played some of them.
The other difficulty is knowing what song to start with. At least on my iPod, even when you shuffle the songs still show up in the same order on the list.
No, that’s known. The question is whether the iPod is equally likely to choose all permutations of your playlist, or if some are more likely than others.
But it bounces around the list, right? That’s just the display.
Maybe what we ( I ) really want is not “random”.
I’d like to have at least an option on the ipod that would play the 500 songs (or how ever many songs you had on it) without repeating at all.
And once it got through the whole list of 500 songs, it would shuffle them in a completely different order and play through the 500 again without repeating.
But maybe the ipod’s “brain” can’t handle this. IS THIS REALLY TOO MUCH TO ASK FROM APPLE?
(Sorry about the shouting, but it just drives me crazy when I hear the same songs again and again while other songs almost never come up. And don’t tell me its just my imagination. The “times song played” list on my computer tells the story very clearly.
I’m assuming here that every iPod works like mine, which really does generate a permutation of the songs every time I shuffle. If there are some models that sample with replacement, that’s a different behavior.
But the story can be misleading. I tend to switch around between playlists on my iPod. My wife was grousing about always hearing the same stuff over and over. I told her I have over 4,000 songs–it can’t be repeating that much, even if most of the playlists are only a few hundred.
Then I started checking the lists.
I found one song that was on eight different playlists. No wonder she heard it more than others.