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Back in the day, Apple had to tweak the shuffle feature on iTunes because truly random wasn’t random enough for people. It seems incomprehensible to some that a random playlist would play the same song twice in a row. People should roll a die more often.
It was doing a random selection when people expected a randomly ordered sequence.
This is it. What people think random is vs what it really is are often different.
The same song in a row three times is random etc. Randomness includes clumping. But most people think clumping isn’t random. We think shuffled is random.
The button isn’t even called random anymore. It’s called shuffle.
The book Fooled by Randomness is the best book on the phenomenon I’ve read. Taleb kills it in this book and it might be worth your time if this is interesting to you.
Vlc, atleast on android does randomly ordered sequence for music. The list is generated when you shuffle and it also shows how many tracks are remaining and total time for thoose tracks. No track repeats till a full sequence is over and i belive that is the best way of shuffling songs. But still you shoukd be removing thoose specific songs from your pkaylist by yourself
It was only playing the same song twice if people have the same song twice in their library or playlist. The only other possibility with either shuffle software is if you have it on shuffle repeat all, and it just so happens that the last song in the first shuffling is also the first song in the next. This can still happen today, but it is increasingly rare the larger your playlist is.
The issue back then was how it would randomly play the same artist twice in a row, or manage to play songs from an alum sequentially. Truly random shuffling.
Steve Jobs coined the term “less random” because the then-new shuffle would intentionally avoid playing the same artist or songs from the same album twice in a row.
I’ve noticed that randomized Spotify has what I call “rivers” of songs, where once it randomly hits one song along the river, it will always play the next one in the river until it hits the end. It’s really annoying.
I think the spotify shuffle+ algorithm weighs songs more when you’ve liked them more recently.
I’m also fairly confident the artist’s contract impacts the weight as well, especially for suggested songs not in your playlist.
Songs from the backlog get played, but at a much lower frequency. Random should have a relatively flat distribution, not a skewed bell curve.
I really wish a platform would come out with a “I like this song, but not so much that I want to hear it everyday, maybe play it once a month or so” button
I don’t know if this will help you but I throw everything I scribble into a “Liked” playlist and remove it into a “Tired of it” playlist when it meets the criteria you describe. Then every 6-9 months or so I think to sweep through that playlist and move some stuff back lol.
It’s obviously a hacky solution but it makes me feel better.
Its not random and they are honest about that. Because true randomness leads to occurrences were people think it can’t be random. Funny video about it :
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OdLyKETk5o0&pp=ygUcc3BvdGlmeSBzaHVmZmxlIGlzbid0IHJhbmRvbQ%3D%3D
Couldn’t they just make it completely random without repeats until all songs are played or something?
Then it’s per definition not completely random.
It is. It’s just a different kind of random
Choose a random song from the kist each time VS Make a truly random ordering of the given playlist
It’s a different kind of random, one which is very much not completely random.
It’s better for it to not be completely random though.
The ordering is completely random tho? I mean, now this is just semantics. The ordering of the songs are not made to space out nearby songs or anything. In that sense it is completely randomone of all permutations(50P50) of songs.
I was thinking more like “remove a random thing from a group” than “point at a random thing from a group”
Having multiple songs by the same artist play after each other, or the same music style is also perceived as not random.
And once you factor in that, you are at what Spotify is doing now.
True random doesn’t feel like random to people, like the other commenter said.
But there is selection bias involved as well. You don’t register the amount of time it plays the ‘correct’ music, but the wedding tracks really stand out.
I like to set random on my Navidrome instance, but that also includes my ost albums, which I don’t want.
It’s not that I’m lazy to remove them, it’s just that I can’t. I like listening to those, just not in my random queue
One thing that’s been pissing me off lately on YouTube Music is that it’s been changing the upcoming songs AND THE PREVIOUS ONES in a random mix.
Not to mention it’s also been just losing the previous played songs as a whole at random.
This is infuriating as sometime you just gotta play the song a few times and then BAM it loses everything. Or I’ll change the order of the next few songs and then BAM, completely different songs in the queue.
On regular YouTube, the fact that they automatically make anything with music into a mix-playlist also isn’t great.
A lot of the time, I just want to listen to one track of something, and end up having to strip out the playlist argument from the actual link because I don’t want to get everything similar to it.
I feel personally attacked :-(
