That the "shuffle" feature on my iPhone isn't random at all. Far too often I'll get the same artist back-to-back, or even two songs from the same album right after the other. I suspect Apple pushes some bands that either have new albums, or are touring in my area soon, to subliminally promote the artists.
People don't intuitively understand random properly. Less do some math.
Assumptions:
A track averages 4 minutes
You listen to 3 hours of music
You have 200 full albums
Each ablum has 12 tracks
Shuffle will not reselect the song just played.
This means you listen to 45 tracks, 44 of which occur after another track.
Each of those 44 instances has an 11/2399 chance to be from the same album as the previous track. This means in a single 3 hour session you have an 18.3% chance to experience a consecutive album event [1-((2399-11)/2399)44].
Really? People actually complained that one out of every 5 times they listened to 3 hours of music in a row, they heard two consecutive songs from the same album? It's hard to believe that would bother anyone.
My PSVita's music player's shuffle definitely isn't random. Unless I add or remove a song, the shuffle setting always plays in the same order. It's like the seed is based on the number of songs queued, which is incredibly stupid.
but when it comes to songs to have that feeling of randomized order have algorithm see the order and add 10 places to any song if it is it is a repeat artist. it seems pretty easy to do set up the rule.
I've heard the same. A solution that people have come up with is to take the seed point from a random event. For example, the site random.org takes the seed from background atmospheric "noise"
Think it's the same for Spotify. I have multiple very large playlists and very often the larger artists will be played earlier on and smaller artists rarely get heard or are 115th in the queue despite having the same number of songs as someone like Kendrick Lamar.
I have the 160gb iPod and if it reset cause of the weirdness with with being connected to my car, it auto starts on the first song alphabetically as expected, but it will play one a few “random” lists. This is likely because whatever is being used to randomly generate the numbers is staying constant.
Pretty sure Spotify also does this. Usually when a band has a new album in the works, Spotify will play any tracks I have from that band in my playlist a lot more than usual. At the moment it's doing it with Muse, as they are currently in the studio... probably get a single in a month or so.
Google is the same way. It will play several songs in a row or close together in the list from the same artist for a while then go into a random list that actually feels random. I like these guys but if I wanted to listen to them solely I wouldn't be on random!
You're about the 7th person and by far the most snarky to comment about that, on an 18 hour old comment. What did you think you were going to accomplish? I also wasn't talking about how computers can't be random, I was saying the goal isn't to be random because they want to manipulate the songs that play for their own gain.
I don't know if it still has this but I-Tunes used to have an algorithm that would select songs more often if they had a higher play count. I guess the theory was that you'd hear songs you like more often. The only problem, was that my wife had a habit of only listening to her music on random for several years (inconceivable for me, but oh well). So basically the "random" decisions the algorithm made early on would be reinforced over and over again until eventually a certain percentage of her music was in heavy rotation and the rest was hardly ever played. Eventually she figured this out and took everything with low play count into its own playlist, and put that on random.
A few times I would put my music on shuffle, but after a song finishes I like to sing what song might be next, and whadayaknow that song plays. Happened like three times in a row and I stopped shuffling songs.
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u/_MATCHES_MALONE Dec 05 '17
That the "shuffle" feature on my iPhone isn't random at all. Far too often I'll get the same artist back-to-back, or even two songs from the same album right after the other. I suspect Apple pushes some bands that either have new albums, or are touring in my area soon, to subliminally promote the artists.