[jerf]

Truly random shuffling is not very good in practice, really.

Way back in the day, before the current trend towards throwing all your MP3s in a pile and using id3 tags to hopefully sort it out, I had my MP3s in a directory structure by rough genre and album. I wrote myself a shuffler that would honor the directory structure; it would tend to stay in the same directory and use a record of the most recently played songs to avoid repeats, and only jump out if it needed to, or with some relatively smaller probability. Then there was a relatively smaller probability it would continue jumping up through the directories.

The idea is, if you have a multi-genre collection, you may want a "shuffle" but it can be jarring to whiplash between the various genres on every single song as a fully random shuffle would do. So shuffles would tend to honor albums, then honor genre, so that there was a small chance you might flip from techno to classical, and if you did, it would tend to stay in classical for a while, before flipping to pop music or whatever.

I do sort of miss it and sort of simulate it nowadays by just being a bit heavyhandedly intentional about the playlists I make for the day.