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by dbbolton
5068 days ago
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Leonard Mlodinow touches on this issue in The Drunkard's Walk[1]. If I remember correctly, his explanation was something along the lines of this: a truly random playlist is not desirable to most users, which challenges the claim "I do believe the ordering is truly random the first time it's generated" in the top answer. Mlodinow explains that most people really don't understand randomness, and a "truly random" playlist might have the same song twice in a row, play a few songs from the same album in the normal order, and things like that. Some people don't realize that rolling 1,2,3,4,5,6 on a die in order is as likely as 6,4,1,2,5,3 even though the second set of outcomes might seem more likely because it looks more random. To outcount for this, iTunes actually does use an algorithm to make the shuffled playlist "better" than a truly random one. Of course, by some definitions, even rand() isn't random enough, so I can see why people argue about it. The book doesn't even provide a rigorous definition of the concept, but it was never intended to be a serious treatise on statistics. 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/books/review/Johnson-G-t.h... |
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I have been dealing with Samsung half-phone half-MP3 players for a while now, and they all choose the next track randomly. I pine for the days when I used to have an iPod that could run Rockbox, so that the "back" and "forward" functions worked in the shuffled playlist. Sometimes I mean "rewind to start" and I accidentally tap the button twice to say "seek to last track." That takes me to a random track and then the original is no longer available as "next". So irritating.
And this randomness-is-too-random crap does happen. I'll put on a list of songs to sing along to, only a few hundred songs, and often after half an hour or an hour I'll be repeating songs which I've already sung. Sometimes they'll be two-in-a-row or separated by only one, two, or three different songs.
(The other great thing about Rockbox was that I had access to folders which automatically acted like playlists. We've had debates about this back and forth around HN, I know, but suffice it to say that it's really nice to have an "Audiobooks" folder where you can download individual book folders. Otherwise you often have to make sure that you don't get bizarre interleaved numberings, chapter 01 from book X followed by chapter 01 from book Y. In Samsung, this is actually governed by the Title of the ID3 tag of the MP3, which can be even worse.