Again, it’s well established that, technically speaking, having a band’s full album play songs 1-10 in a row out of a giant library is semantically truly random. It’s just utterly useless as a shuffle function for a music player.
In my case, having the same few bands repeat up to 4 times within the first 50 tracks is TRULY RANDOM, but also total garbage as a “shuffle” function. My sentience allowing me to notice this isn’t really the problem. It’s a lousy shuffle.
I have a SanDisk Clip MP3 player with over 250 different songs I play on random as I jog.
In my 30 minutes of jogging despite being on completely random with 250 choices there’s about 3 songs that have a 50% chance of showing up during those 30 minutes of jogging every single time.
If it is on “completely random”, then each song played has 247/250 chances of not being one of the 3. If you have time for, say, 10 songs, that makes about an 11% chance of one of those songs showing up. If it’s really 50% (not just a bad estimate), then, sure, there is a problem.
As I recall, a standard card shuffle does NOT shuffle the cards into a good random order, and that it was well known there were predictable results. So maybe “shuffle” is a good description of OP’s phone does …
Anyway, unless somebody has credible, reliable, independent documentation, ‘random shuffle’ could mean anything. If the device is doing a “random walk” from the starting point, (which is one kind of reasonable approach that might please some people), then repetition and centering is highly probable.
Correct, this is well-known among card players, and the folklore I always heard was to shuffle seven times for a thorough mix.
I consider it poor design if I do not have control over the parameters of the “random walk” and its underlying links, or if this functionality is not documented.
What is the average length of your songs? Mine are typically 3-4 minutes. Based upon your description above, every time you shuffle play your library, the same 5 songs are played first or within the first 6-7 songs that are played. That doesn’t sound correct.
I ran a new shuffle today and counted the first 30 tracks played. The approximate runtime for the first 30 tracks was a total of around 120 minutes.
Tracks 11, 13, 17, 18, 22 and 28 were all the same band.
Tracks 6, 10, 23, and 26 were all the same band (Pavement)
Tracks 8, 16 and 27 all the same band.
There are around 200 different bands to pick from, and almost half of the first 30 slots were occupied by only 3 different bands.
I understand randomness. I was reading Knuth before most of you were born.
Obviously some bands or artists, which I have a lot of songs from, show up more often than others and often repeat. No problem there. Albums with lots of tracks (like Variations) show up more often than albums with few tracks. No problem there either.
But a consistent experience of several albums showing up again and again (similar to dontbesojumpy’s experience,) shows something is not random. This is a shuffle, btw - tracks never repeat unless I have more than one of them stored.
It seems more likely that for this player they decided that when you hear one track from an album you are primed to hear another, and so distort the shuffle to provide it.
I have hundreds of albums and thousands of tracks, so while it happening once in a while is reasonable, it is not reasonable for it to happen consistently.
This may be incorrect, but I was never under the impression that iTunes “shuffle” was random. Otherwise they would call it “random” play, not “shuffle” play.
I was under the impression that is analyses the songs using some sort of algorithm (as other posters have argued), maybe tempo, genre etc and plays them in groups based on that, siding between groups slowly so there is no jarring change from song to song.
My workout playlist on my iPhone has very wide range of music about +1000 songs, from 1950’s rock to modern day with some classical thrown in. When I do a “shuffle” it tends to keep things in their genres and similar tempos. I assumed that was how it was supposed to work.
I’ll get many songs in a row by similar artists (or even the same artist) in similar genres, then it will start to shift me to other artists and genres. I never get “Ride of the Valkyries” followed by Sex Pistols “God Save the Queen” followed by “You Can’t Hurry Love.” etc.
One interpretation is that “shuffle” plays through all the songs on a CD or playlist once each, in a random order (like shuffling a deck of cards), while “random” picks songs randomly without worrying about whether or not they’re being repeated. But I don’t claim that this is how these terms are universally used.
Anyway, I found this article that says the same thing that Ike Witt’s does: that Spotify changed their shuffle algorithm to be less random so that it would seem more random.
So, presumably, what the OP wants to know now is how to get a genuinely randomly (deck of cards) shuffled playlist in Pi Music Player…
Would love.
But would settle for just not hearing the same band 6 out of 17 songs.
These are quite possibly contradictory requests.
The basic shuffle feature is supposed to be completely random. What you’re describing (the analyzing, employing an algorithm, etc) sounds more like the Genius function, which creates shuffles and playlists of complimentary songs.
Does your app have a list of all your songs in alphabetical order? My main options are Songs, Artists, Albums and Playlists (that I created myself). If you have an all-inclusive alphabetical song list, try what I suggested in post #10. Just pick a song from somewhere on that list and hit Play, with Shuffle turned off. Listen for awhile and see what you think. You have nothing to lose.
The only time you’ll hear the same band is in rare cases like Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, which has Shine On You Crazy Diamond Pts. 1 to 5, but that will be the exception, not the rule.
Gambler’s fallacy.
Increase your population and your perceived non-randomness will decrease.
My “random” playlist is a bunch of songs in alphabetical order. It goes through 10 times. The frequency for a particular song depends on how often I want to hear it. One song may be in all time, one every other time and one may only be on 3 and 8.
But… I have two Edgar Winter songs - Frankenstein and Free Ride. They are usually back to back (Free Bird is sometimes in the middle)
And three of my four Jimmy Buffett songs are close together. Cheeseburger in Paradise, Changes in Latitude and Come Monday. Fins is later down the list.
There are a lot of deep computer science explanations for why perfect shuffles are tricky. This is an important issue for online gambling. One is simply that there are 8x10^67 possible ways a deck of 52 cards can be shuffled, and most computer random number generators, even the really good ones, can’t generate that many unique patterns.
But I agree with other posters, none of those comp-sci-theory flaws are humanly detectable.
The problem with “Shuffle” modes is that the shuffles have annoying, noticeable patterns and clusters. But patterns and clusters is a characteristic of a good shuffle. Decks with no noticeable coincidences are a minority, so if you get those a lot, it’s a sign that the shuffle is being tampered with to seem random. Like an account ledger that has no round numbers.
I’ve heard that web cartoonists sometimes get emails that the “Show Random Comic” link on their web-page isn’t “Random enough” because it showed a reader four comics in a row on the same topic, or whatever.
What’s really needed is not a “Random shuffle”, but an “aesthetically pleasing shuffle”. Like an AI Disc Jockey. I’ll bet the streaming services have put a lot of time into developing something like that.
I use Rocket Player on my Galaxy Note 8.
Identical complaint.
I beat it by scrolling down the main song list and randomly hitting play.
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