[aperture]

I can attest to this.

I tested on python a music playlist and randomly arranged the numbers, and also tried the same on vlc. I found in python, numbers were really random (done maybe a month or two ago, so they implemented the new algo). However, in vlc, this was the issue:

Songs would come in as [6, 7, 8, 3, 4, 1, 2, 5]

So the "random" or "shuffle" was kind of half-done. You would have the same artist's songs being played because if you sorted by album they were right next to each other.

I went on #vlc once and I tried submitting a bug report. I seem to recall one or two was submitted online, but many claim it is simply not a bug. Random or shuffle, either way the definition is skewed as there is some linearity.

Luckily, I have cmus, and I connected that with cmus-remote to my android. ;) Trust me, once you have a nice linux ncurses player for terminal, it is very hard to seriously consider any competitors. Vlc is still nice though to tell my friends to install on windows machines for anime. And because they have a music library of ~30 songs, they will probably not notice the shuffle issue.

[driverdan]

This exactly the result you'd expect from randomization. There will always be some sequences that are in their original order. It sounds like you want some kind of pseudo-random playlist with no artists next to each other. That is not random.

[aperture]

I am sorry, got back from work and noticed I wasn't very specific.

What I mean to say is imagine a deck of cards, to be "shuffled".

Most players will shuffle by rearranging the cards, and you'll get the occasional adjacent cards next to each other, or you may not, it is just random all around.

In vlc, you get more of a beginner's shuffle (say, from a child). Cards are mixed, but not shuffled fully. This results in play which prefers groupings of cards (Ace of spades, 2 of spades, 3 of spades), but at a common rate. Therefore, we can say it is "sort of" shuffled.

I preformed about five tests, and found as little as ten songs will show the effect. My test was install the newest vlc (windows 7 64-bit build), add 10 songs to playlist once it opens, then hit shuffle and record how the 9 songs are shuffled (assuming you are on song 1 in the playlist).

To have comparable random data, I did "import random" in python and then random.shuffle with an array with values in the range of ten.

From this, I gathered vlc was not random "enough", which for a music library of around 10,000 (11,000 now, but 10 at the time), this became irritating enough that I view vlc more as a starter multimedia platform. Were this issue to be fixed (or even seen as an issue!), I would be quite surprised.