The Perception of 'Random' on the iPod

Robaato writes "Stephen Levy writes in the Guardian about the perception of randomness, or the lack thereof, on an iPod set to shuffle." From the article: "My first iPod loved Steely Dan. So do I. But not as much as my iPod did.... I didn't keep track of every song that played every time I shuffled my tunes, but after a while I would keep a sharp ear out for what I came to call the LTBSD (Length of Time Before Steely Dan) Factor. The LTBSD Factor was always perplexingly short." My first iPod shuffle refused to let me delete (sigh) Weird Al's Polkamon off of the flash memory.

Comments

And Zonk dupes himself... again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the iPod Shuffle Playing Favorites?

How about an analysis of the randomness of Zonk dupes. I guess I should be happy it's not a games story.

Re:And Zonk dupes himself... again...

[strider44]

I think that the slashdot editors can be forgiven for posting a link to an article on a similar topic a year and a half later...

That article is btw referenced in this one.

Re:And Zonk dupes himself... again...

[GarfBond]

Not to mention it looks like Steven Levy essentially duped his own article for the Guardian, with the added benefit of time and history with the shuffle to make a conclusion.

Re:And Zonk dupes himself... again...

[The-Bobmeister]

Well, it's been almost 18 months since this topic was last posted, so I'd venture that Slashdot has a very sophisticated article randomization algorithm!

Re:And Zonk dupes himself... again...

[mikesd81]

Well, there is times I wanted to post an article but wasn't sure if it was posted yet and I searched for it. Surely he can too?

Re:And Zonk dupes himself... again...

[mrchaotica]

It might as well be; he's certainly not doing any editing!

Bias

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Re:Bias

[IntelEmployee]

Blah Blah Blah........ Clusters are a common occurrence in randomness. If it played the same song every time you would have one extreme. If it played all the songs evenly a part, you would have the other extreme. Try something in the middle? That's where you will have clusters of a few songs played a lot, and clusters of some songs not played often or even at all. Want me draw you a picture? i iii iiiiii iii i It's all pseudo random anywho, and I don't think your clock cycle has a thing for steely dan, else the whole world is in trouble!

Re:Bias

[pchan-]

This is exactly what is going on. Good call, AC.

Some years ago, I worked on an mp3 playing device (no, not Apple). Our users were quite often complaining that our random was not truly random, and seems to be clustering, favoring, disliking some thing or another. Some would swear that there was some intelligence to it, picking particular songs. I've seen the shuffle code, it's a simple array swap. I ran a numerical simulation on the output and found that the distribution of the array elements from their original position equal throughout. Further, there seemed to be no specific clustering, as the probability that any item would end up next to any of its peers was again equally distributed throughout. We had some of the customers submit their own ideas and tried them out in code. In general, we found that we never outperformed the simple array swap in terms of randomness, though most results were about the same.

The conclusion that we reached: If you have a lot of Jimmy Buffet, you're going to hear a lot of Jimmy Buffet. And on that one occassion that two Buffet songs play back to back, you're going to think to yourself "this random sucks". But it is, in fact, all in your head.

*I'm sure someone will want to bring up the seed issue. Let's just say that we had it covered.

Re:Bias

[Stooshie]

Just to expand on what pchan said, the chance of getting all the songs ordered by artist, is just the same as getting any other particular combination of songs.

Re:Bias

[NeMon'ess]

Never-the-less, letting power-users control the randomness would be a nice feature. Say I have ten songs from an artist. When I make a playlist of a thousand songs, and the aforementioned ten all get played within the first three-hundred, that's not desirable to me. That means in the last 700 songs I'm not going to hear that artist, and that could mean weeks or months of playtime.

Apple does include an option for the minimum number of songs before playing an artist again, but that doesn't necessarily fix the problem. The songs should be spread out. I'm okay with two of the same artist back-to-back as long as they're not all played too close together or worse, overplayed.

Just because randomly an artist may temporarily get played more often isn't a good way of doing things.

Additionally, iTunes and other programs don't give an option to weight the play-order based on how long it's been since a song played. If I just heard a song last week, the program should play another by that artist that I haven't heard in three months. Now I don't mean it should always play the oldest-played song first, otherwise they'd be stuck in a loop. But weight the order towards older-played.

Finally, iTunes doesn't make a note in its database if I've skipped a song before it finished or early on. How many times have users skipped a song because he or she wasn't in the mood for it, or heard it too recently? It would be better if iTunes tracked both last-played, and last-attempted-played. So when it makes a playlist, it puts songs I haven't heard for a while in early, and songs it recently attempted-to-play in later.

Just because what I'm asking for is 10+ times more computationally costly than what iTunes and iPods currently do doesn't mean it's hard. CPUs are more than powerful enough to do this in the background while playing songs.

Re:Bias

[NeMon'ess]

Right. I want a controllable Shuffled mode to mix up the order. I don't want true Random play. I think that's what a lot of people want. Perhaps even a majority.

I don't even necessarily want 1 of those 10 songs played every 100. Last year I made a multi-thousand-song playlist in iTunes. After shuffling it and listening mostly through, I was noticing when tracks by Wolfstone played. I went back and realized that about 80% of those tracks had played in the first half of the playlist. Because the last 20% were spaced so far apart in the second half, and playing so rarely, it was catching my ear.

So I ended up wishing the distribution had been more even. Not exactly 50-50 even, but 80-20 was too skewed. More like 65-35 would probably be enough. And of course the songs I hadn't listened-through in a long time should have been weighted to play sooner in the list than the more recently heard ones.

Re:Bias

[GeffDE]

And I want iTunes to make me a continental breakfast every day by 7 sharp and then clean my house and prepare dinner for when I arrive home.

iTunes is a jukebox program, not your own robotic DJ. iTunes does give the option to weight the play-order based on how long it's been since a song played. Go to your library, turn off "shuffle mode," sort the library by Date Played and play the songs you heard last. In order. There you go. 100% weighting on date played. iTunes doesn't make a note in its database if you've skipped a song because it doesn't include one of those fucking mood rings so it knows what color you are when you want to listen to Kelly Clarkson vs what color you are when you want to listen to Celine Dion. And how can iTunes tell when you heard it too recently? Maybe you just heard a new song, and like it a lot, so you want to hear it a lot. Does iTunes know that? Is iTunes supposed to have a T3 line to Ms. Cleo's brain?

Lastly, iTunes sucks down quite a few cycles even during normal playback. And when it sucks down too many, it bogs down the system. Now, when I have iTunes on random mode, it can also be referred to as "I was iTunes to provide ambient noise for while I am working on other things." And when iTunes starts interefering with that, I get cranky. I like that iTunes does what it is supposed to do, and doesn't try to do everything. If you want something that will wipe your ass for you, find a maid, not a jukebox program.

Re:Bias

[GregWebb]

Agreed. Evenly weighted (or biased according to preferences) shuffle is far more useful than random.

In my last job, I listened to MP3s all day while working. I'd got RoboDJ feeding in the playlist, and Audioscrobbler logging the results.

Which turned out - that, remarkably consistently, Iron Maiden, Placebo and System Of A Down (typically 'Aerials' from Toxicity) got played more than their weightings justified, while Deep Purple measurably less than theirs. Including compensating for number of tracks held.

It may have been random, it may have been provable that each run had even distribution, but in the runs I was doing there it would have been far more useful if the computer had logged what it had already played, and tried to keep a track from getting too far outside its stated range. Less random, yes - less what I asked the computer for, definitely not.

Re:Bias

[Yer Mom]

Finally, iTunes doesn't make a note in its database if I've skipped a song before it finished or early on.

iTunes 7 does.

Mind, it doesn't do anything particularly useful with it, but you have Last Skipped and Skip Count available for Smart Playlists, so you could probably get some way towards what you want...

Re:Bias

[CreatureComfort]

This is exactly the thing I try to point out to people who play the lottery and insist that their numbers are far more likely to come up than the 1 2 3 4 5 I suggest they play.

OCD

[eldavojohn]

Or - and here is the nub of an issue that would consume me for more than a year - was the shuffle function, meant to mix up my music collection in a random fashion, actually not random at all?

There there, Mr. Levy, we'll get you all the randomness you want. In fact, we have a special place filled with randomness and padded white walls! You're going to like it there.

You know, instead of wasting your interviewee's time, you could have installed a five song list on your iPod and set it to shuffle. You'd have to carefully mark down the track number being played and listen to it for 100 songs. Do this a few times and make sure you're very methodical about what you do. Wipe the iPod, put five songs on it in order and then listen to a hundred songs "randomly." If you start to see a pattern developing or one song is obviously favored over the other, it will begin to show up.

But on the more technical side, they have to seed the random variable with something. Whether or not it's an internal clock, I'm not sure. Either way, they have to derive a random number and it's possible that their seed isn't good enough or has too few states or is prone to being seeded at the same state, etc. Based on this information, I hate to break it to you but it is very hard to be truly random.

Re:OCD

[monoqlith]

Not OCD. Sub-clinical schizophrenia. . Read all the way to the end of the article(I'm new here). If you don't want to, I'll summarize: It's more about randomness than the iPod. He eventually realizes his suspicions of programmer malfeasance are in fact an expression of his own favoritism, not the iPod's. In other words, its all in his head. So a worthwhile, interesting article, and even if he could have benefitted by experimenting himself, that wouldn't have made for a very fun read, or an interesting question to ask Steve Jobs while he had the chance.

Re:OCD

[timeOday]

As if any of this were relevant to music listening.

The simple truth is that the shuffle was an extremely lame product that was only created so Apple could cover the entire price range of mp3 players. Nobody else had the gall to sell a player with no display. "An experience in aural spontaneity..." pardon me while I barf. It was a simple matter of designing to a price. I won't question Apple on it because they've made more money from the iPod than I ever would have imagined. The folks who bought a Shuffle, on the other hand, I have to wonder about.

SLAYER!!!!!!!1

[litewoheat]

My iPod likes Slayer and Marilyn Manson. I guess its posessed.

Mine loves Chevelle

[Private.Tucker]

...well, used to. Then I made a different playlist and labeled it as "Upbeat" music. Now It loves Motion City Soundtrack. Now, I like all the music I have on my iPod (duh) but its very noticeable when I hear the same song 3 times in one hour 30 minutes worth of driving. I can tell you that over the last 2 days (4 hours of driving) I have heard Foo Fighters' "Enough Space" 6 times out of 231 songs. Does the iPod sense higher played songs/albums/groups or is its randomness just that awful? 2GB Nano 1g

Re:Mine loves Chevelle

[philipgar]

if the iPod/iTunes sensed higher played songs and played them more, it would actually cause a huge disaster, depending on how it was implemented. A simple implementation would increase the likelihood that a song gets played again by a fixed percentage. Under a situation like this, no matter how small of a percentage the song increases it's likelihood of being played by, and regardless of how many songs you have on the device, over enough time it will reach the point where it will effectively only play one song over and over 99.9999999% of the time. It's the problem with positive reinforcement as the song will become more likely to be played the more it's played, and once one song gets "lucky enough" it will be promoted just high enough to start dominating, and from there it quickly runs away. I ran a simulation similar to this not too long ago as I was thinking about it.

Now, if you scale the likelihood of a song being played by a fixed scalar value, this runaway effect won't happen, but that isn't as much fun to do, and would mean overtime the scaling would be meaningless as each song has a high enough value that the scalar/value is effectively zero (or on a floating point number could be zero).

Phil

Old News.

[mh101]

I recall The Steve personally addressing this issue in one of his keynotes (although not with iPods, but iTunes). People thought iTunes' shuffle feature wasn't random enough. Steve assured everyone that it indeed was completely random, but then announced that iTunes had a new "Smart Shuffle" option. The description in iTunes is "Smart shuffle allows you to control how likely you are to hear multiple songs in a row by the same artist or from the same album." There's a slider with "More Likely" on one end, "Less likely" on the other end, and "Random" right in the middle. Although this feature is in iTunes, it has not yet made it onto iPods.

I personally have had it happen where my iPod is in shuffle mode and I've heard not just two songs in a row by the same artist, but a song plays and then the next song from that album follows it. And that's with a library of over 5,000 songs. Naturally it's more likely to happen on a much smaller Shuffle with a fraction of the songs.

Re:Old News.

[noidentity]

How funny, the original shuffle was random, but that wasn't considered random because people have this odd notion that random means that certain combinations will never occur. Now they have the new, improved random that's less random so that it'll seem more random. That's progress!

Truly Random

[sriramv_iyer]

I agree that it is extremly difficlut to be truly random. There are some good ways of initializing the seed in such a way that the pseudo random number generator behaves differently. A good way, done in telecom terminals is to measure the noise at the receiver and then use it to seed the random number generator. Since, the noise is truly random, that is a good way to seed the random number generator. If the costs, are not too high, then it might even be a good idea to read noise (or any truly random parameter) whenever required. That would be close to really random, provided, we can map the random parameter into a quantitative parameter without big errors and approximations.

Re:Truly Random

[Jerf]

It's not cost-effective to be "truly random" with an iPod Shuffle's hardware budget, but who cares. It's not at all hard to convince a pattern-seeking human that it's not "random", because our pattern-seeking human thinks "random" means "play everything once, then start over with a fresh list", which is anything but random.

I just ran a simulation here of 100 songs, randomly chosen until all 100 songs had been selected once, and ran it 1000 times. On average, it took 523 choices to exhaust the list due to repeats, and on average, the most-played song over that time period had been played 11.7 times before the last unplayed song was finally played.

Joe User will of course assume that the iPod "likes" the song it plays 11.7 times and "hates" the song it only "begrudgingly" gets around to playing 500+ play-throughs later, but that's true randomness.... and one of my pet peeves with MP3 programs.

Humans very rarely want true randomness. When we claim to want randomness in our shuffle, we actually want a somewhat more sophisticated algorithm. But programmers hear "random" and, well, the easiest thing to do is just call the "randint" function... I did once write a non-random shuffler for a thoroughly-non-mainstream music program and I thought it worked out pretty well, but I've never been able to interest anyone in the idea, because it seems like a lot of implementation work vs. "randint".

import random
from operator import add
 
amounts = []
maxes = []
 
def average(seq):
    total = reduce(add, seq) + 0.0
    return total/len(seq)
 
for x in range(1000):
    choices = {}
 
    i = 0
    while 1:
        i += 1
        next = random.randint(0, 99)
        if not choices.has_key(next):
            choices[next] = 1
        else:
            choices[next] += 1
        if len(choices.keys()) == 100:
            break
 
    amounts.append(i)
    values = choices.values()
    values.sort(lambda a, b: cmp(b, a))
    maxes.append(values[0])
 
print "Average choices: %s" % average(amounts)
print "Average max: %s" % average(maxes)

Consider this program on par with any other Slashdot post; it may have typos, it may even be flat wrong, it certainly wasn't engineered for use in an enterprise-class environment nor analysed for how to make it run faster or with fewer keystrokes, etc. It wasn't composed in a browser text-box but only slightly more care was poured into it.

As I like to say, "random is blotchy". Smoothness is a dead giveaway that a process isn't random. Randomness produces bell curves, not uniform distributions.

People are Pattern seekers

[BigDiz]

Humans innately seek patterns in things that are random. That's why so many people wear smelly socks because they think they're lucky. Once you identify a supposed "pattern" i.e. non-randomness, you're going to keep noticing instances that fit that pattern, and ignore instances that do not. This is deeply ingrained.

Think about it, if you're at the roulette table and black has come up four times in a row, how likely are you to bet black? Most people would bet red, because, I mean hey, there's got to be a pattern. But (as I'm sure you all can understand) black has the same probability of occurring again as red does.

People have had this complaint about all sorts of playlist randomizers (not just iPod), it's just people seeing what isn't there.

Re:People are Pattern seekers

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, if you show people two series of dots, one really random and one evenly distributed, but not regular and ask them which is more random, they will say the evenly distributed one, becasue the random one has what we see as obvious patterns in it. So, I think what people want is evenly distributed (but not regular) mixing of songs, not true randomness.

Two random modes

[daeg]

Apple should add another random play mode -- one that acts as it does now, and the other mode that grants every song an equal play count. The only thing that would be random is which order. This way users that have a confirmation bias of their iPod favoring certain songs can no longer be paranoid of Apple conspiracies to promote the songs of {{ artist }} or {{ record_label }}.

Re:Never true randomness

[Reaperducer]

I have one but only ever use it on long journeys and no I don't have DRM'd tracks so I didn't care about online music purchases. The ipod just happened to be the one that worked the best (scrollwheel is nice and quick) and having a mac I knew it'd work well.

It's a shame how people on Slashdot aren't allowed to just like iPods -- they always feel pressured to justify the purchase.

"Best tool for the job" isn't good enough. You have to be different. But only in a pro-Linux anti-iPod sort of way. Any other kind of being different gets you modded troll or flamebait.

Re:Bias - hmm

[sreekotay]

Not sure its so much confirmation bias (alone at least), as it is that the odds of NOT playing a song from the same artists over the next X songs shrinks more rapidly than intuition suggests. That is, for example the odds of NOT having a run of X heads or Y tails when flipping Z coins is very, very small.

The article mentions the "how many people does it take to get to a shared birthday thing" - and the point there is that its not that it takes 40 people to get to one with a SPECIFIC birthday but only 40 or so to find two that SHARE a birthday.
-----
graphically speaking

SmartShuffle

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

The open-source music player I wrote (BSoftPlayer) has a feature called "SmartShuffle". One of the biggest problems with shuffle is that it's difficult to understand when the tracks will change order, and it's difficult to know wheter or not a track is going to be played more than once in a single "cycle". Some shuffle features will play the same track twice before playing through your entire library, and some won't.

With SmartShuffle, the order is randomized, but it remains the same until you "reshuffle".

Truly, a Slashdot legend

[punkass]

What, we're losing Anonymous Coward? He's been here since the begining, and he wrote half the posts! OH NOES!!!!1!

It's because of the birthday paradox

[neomage86]

You can get the technical details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox/


The basic gist is that their are far more possible pairs than we'd intuitively imagine. For example, with 20 albums of 20 songs each, the chance of two songs in a row being from the same album is actually:
400/400 * 20/400 = 1/20
Which makes a lot of sense once you sit down and think about it, but is a lot higher than an uneducated guess.

This is the same reason that collision/timing attacks are feasible.

Re:It's because of the birthday paradox

[nine-times]

I think it's more than that. Yes, coincidences will happen, but I also think part of the issue with people perceiving patterns is that they can switch patterns whenever a new pattern seems to emerge. So, with reference to the Birthday Paradox, it's true that, in a party, it's more likely than you think that two people will have the same birthday, but what if you aren't bound by birthdays? What if you're just constantly looking for anything two people could have in common? If you're at the party constantly talking about dates, birthdays, anniversaries, favorite colors, food alergies, etc.-- then there's an excellent chance that you'll find there are lots of people in the party that something in common.

In the case of the iPod, i have an iPod and put it on shuffle often enough. For a little while, i'd always be suspicious that there was something going on. It seemed to happen way too often that I'd get two songs together off the same album or the same band, or I'd get a bunch of '80s songs together, or a lot of songs that I'd grouped in the same genre. You know, no specific pattern I could use to predict what would come next, but on any given day, I seemed to be able to find a pattern.

It wasn't always very conscious or thought out, but I'd catch myself thinking, "weird, I've heard 4 songs from the same album in the last hour. The iPod must not be mixing it up enough." But then I noticed some of my patterns were like, "huh, I've heard a couple Nirvana songs and Foo Fighter songs. My iPod must like Dave Grohl today." And then I realized, I didn't have the name "Dave Grohl" in any metadata anywhere. In order for the pattern to be caused by the library, you'd have to assume that the iPod's circutry somehow knew that Grohl was in both of those bands, but without any such link existing in my iTunes library.

So of course I got rid of the iPod, because it was obviously possessed by the devil and obessesed with Dave Grohl. I guess this guy is right.

RTFA

[mh101]

The article actually goes into more depth than people seem to be getting from the summary. The author is not complaining about problems with the shuffle. Rather, he starts by making note of his early observations, then describing his research into music shuffling, and how we perceive patterns where there are none.

FTFA:

First of all, note what it doesn't do - it's not like mixing all the songs in the equivalent of a big bucket of lottery balls and picking out the next one. Instead, as the name implies, it shuffles the entire library so as to reorder them, just as a blackjack dealer shuffles a deck of cards. If you listen to the entire library all through, you will hear every song once and once only. What is important, then, is not whether a song is included but how evenly an artist's songs are distributed throughout the list. When I say that Steely Dan is over-represented, it means that the band's songs show up early in the run - it would be like a blackjack dealer whose first hand had aces in it.

Or

We perceive trends when there are none. Poker players invariably believe they can lock into streaks. Backgammon champions swear that dice can go hot or cold. Likewise, people think they can cosmically predict what song will come next on their shuffle. The blogger Kapgar, who claimed this power, remembers vividly the times when he predicted a song and the iPod amazingly delivered it. But there may have been a thousand times when his iPod played songs he didn't guess - non-memorable circumstances that, not surprisingly, didn't make an impression.

Sorry buddy, i disagree

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

I think (and have... thunk?) that "randomness" on the ipod is actually a secret R&D weapon in the apple ipod toolkit. From a psychological standpoint alone, what is the value of all other mp3 players being truly (read unadjusted psuedo random) and the ipod being a little less.. that is, what if they, say, mark the number of times you don't let a song play through, but skip it in the first 10 seconds? There are powerful means by which they can onboard build a profile and i have three things to say about that:

1) that is a FUN project for a team of engineers to do and,
2) Why wouldn't they for the HUGE hidden psycological impact it could have in differentiating the player
3) It's closed source so you can't actually tell, so the five songs with-no-user-input model wouldn't work. Another might...

Regardless, i wouldn't expect them to miss the importance such a feature would have. The iPod just keeps the vibe going, while the competition keeps playing country-house-ambient-country-house-ambient

Also, the "sound-check" would be a good place to do some quick BPM detection to have like tempo's play. The new settings for more- or less-random in iTunes almost scream "we are doing something tricky"

Wouldn't you, if you could?

What you should expect...

[YGingras]

A long time ago I was dissatisfied by the lack of random in XMMS so I jumped to the source to see what I could do. I think this was my first contribution to a free software project. Anyway, here is what I found: XMMS keeps two copies of the playlist, one that is in the order you set and one that is "shuffled". This has to be clear, all the tracks in the play list are there exactly once in the shuffled playlist.

I can't recall when the shuffled playlist was reshuffled but in was not that often, maybe only when you added or removed tracks. So if you like Smoke on Water but that Ballroom Blitz is just two song after that, too bad, you'll always get Ballroom Blitz soon after you double click on Smoke on Water. Technically speaking, the shuffling was perfect, the random generator was properly seeded and they divided in the right way to prevent loosing entropy. The lack of reshuffling was entirely responsible to the perceived lack of randomness.

So my patch was just that: trigger reshuffling a lot more often. As far as I know this patch was never merged but my copy of XMMS did have the proper random behavior. I don't know if it's the same problem with the iPod. That's something I like with free software: you can fix it!

Check the play count

[Lumpish Scholar]

I didn't keep track of every song that played every time I shuffled my tunes....

Yeah, you did; or rather, iTunes kept track for you, as the "play count". Take a look.

(I looked at mine; it was closer to uniform than I'd perceived. There's also a "Skip Count", but it's blank for all my songs.)

Similar to radio stations

[dodongo]

I know there will be snarky +5 Funny comments underneath this (as well there should be), but this system to decrease the perceived randomness is actually really similar to the algorithm most radio stations use when programming their music.

There's a simple parameter that's set to control, to within one minute, the amount of temporal separation there must be between playing two songs from the same artist, or the same song twice. The radio algorithm is a little more complicated, since songs aren't in just one big batch like the iTunes library, but in different categories, based generally on the perceived desire of target listeners to hear a given new song, or like and identify with a given older song.

The system is built off the (once literal, now metaphorical) use of index cards: The format clocks say, e.g., at the top of the hour, play a P category song, followed by a B category song, then a G, then an A, etc. You'd have a set of rules, like "don't play the same artist within 45 minutes" or "don't play the same current song within 3 hours", and you'd take the first card in the category that fit all the rules, play it, and move the card to the back of the stack.

Basically, what Apple is doing with that slider is enabling artist separation control, which is completely one of the illusions radio stations (used to) use to convince you they had every song under the sun available to them.

iPod metadata

[Meph_the_Balrog]

Does the iPod sense higher played songs/albums/groups

Actually it does. There's a counter for the number of times a song has been played through completely. I believe one of the in-built playlists accesses this metadata.

Mind you, as to wether the device uses this information to weight its shuffle function is something I have no idea about.

Soul of iPods

[webword]

Maybe iPods are showing us their souls. The inner light is shining through.

Humans and dictionaries define random differently

[jonadab]

Except for mathematicians and programmers, most think of "random" in a *very* different way from its technical definition. To most humans, saying that a particular sequence is "random" means *guaranteeing* certain things about it. Among them: the same element does not occur back-to-back, EVER, even if there are only a few elements total to choose from. Even more, if there are more than about half a dozen elements, the same element never occurs twice within about five positions. (So if you've got songs 1 through 7 on your iPod, and the first seven played are 5, 3, 7, 2, 4, 1, 6, then the next one has to be 5 or 3, or _maybe_ 7, or it doesn't seem "random" to most people. Yet, the order can't be the same every time through, either.) No element occurs substantially more often than any other element, even over the short term. If the elements have a natural order (e.g., alphabetical), then no three elements that are adjascent in that order can ever occur together in that order, nor should they occur together in the reverse order. (This gets particularly difficult to guarantee when the elements have more than one natural order, e.g., if the elements are people, you can't have three of them in a row by either name or age, or people notice and decide that the order is not random.) Even worse, if the elements can all be categorized into a small number of categories (e.g., by gender), you can't have "too many" from one category in a row. (How many is too many depends on the ratio, but if half of the elements are male and half female, having four of either in a row will make people cry foul, the order is not "random".) If certain elements stand out from the others in some significant way, they can neither occur first nor last. (For instance, if test questions are being drawn from a question bank, neither the easiest nor the hardest question should be first or last; if it is, people will say the order was not random.)

I could go on and on, but what it really amounts to is that when most people say "random" they mean "carefully arranged in a thoroughly mixed-up order". This is almost the *opposite* of what a mathematician or computer programmer thinks the word "random" means.

For this reason, when describing a mathematically-random sequence to an end user, I never EVER use the word "random". I generally call it something like "arbitrary" or "unpredictable". This greatly reduces complaints.

Now, as far as song frequency, I like to rate my tracks on a scale of 1-10, and rig my playlist so that anything under a 6 never plays unless I specifically select it, tracks rated 7 play twice as often as those rated 6, and the frequency keeps going up the higher my rating is. (I only have eight tracks rated as a 10, and they're all things I don't mind hearing back-to-back.) Then if I find a track is playing more often than I like, I figure I rated it too high and cut back its rating.

Dupe Tag

[sr180]

And the question remains, why doesnt the DUPE tag work anymore? I liked that tag. Seeing it meant I could avoid the 500 "OMG! Its a Dupe!11!" comments.

"The generation of random numbers is...

[ergean]

too important to be left to chance."

Like Scientoloigists extinguishing streetlights!

[Ancient_Hacker]

It's a psychological thing. Like walking by a streetlight and having it go on or off. If it happens again within an hour or so, you're SURE it had something to do with you. Even if it's the same streetlight. Even if you know when the bulbs get old, they overheat and cycle on and off. Every week or so I hear two Bob Dylan tunes back to back on my iPod. Not too surprising, I only have about 60 tunes on there and Senor Zimmerman "sings" four of them.

Re:Feature Request

[NeMon'ess]

Almost two years ago.

Then they changed their form so they no longer accept feature requests for iTunes, only iPods. As for my request, iTunes 6 doesn't remember where I was in a playlist after closing the program, does version 7?

It only took Apple three or four years to incrementally improve their Shuffle feature. I'm sure I just need to wait another year or two for my request to get implemented.

Maybe in another two or three years enough people will have asked Steve Jobs to get the Shuffle feature to play songs sooner that haven't played in a while. Now that version 7 (are the bugs fixed yet?) notes when a track was skipped, maybe version 8 will actually do this.