7 ms·
Here's the problem: go ahead and ask a bunch of different people what they want/expect their shuffle/random button to do and you'll get a bunch of different ans
by patmcc 7y ago
Here's the problem: go ahead and ask a bunch of different people what they want/expect their shuffle/random button to do and you'll get a bunch of different answers.
1. I want it to play in a truly random fashion, with replacement (same song twice in a row is possible).
2. I want it to play in a truly random fashion, without replacement (each song is removed from the list once played).
3. I want it to "seem" random (don't play too many songs by the same artist in a row).
4. I want it to be random, but predictable (same "random" ordering if I start the playlist again).
5. I want it to play my favourite songs more often than my lower-rated songs.
6. I want it to play my less-commonly played songs more often than the stuff I listen to all the time.
So: what exactly do you want when you say random?
- jbob2000 7y agoOr what about this: I am indecisive about what music I want to listen to in this current moment and I want you to give me options that I will deny until I become decisive about what I want.
- abrowne 7y agoThis is basically what want too, so I like Quod Libet's "Random Album" (and Random Artist and Random Genre) command. It simply focuses on a new album each time I press Ctrl+M, which I can play or queue up.
- alanbernstein 7y agoThis was my favorite feature in winamp and itunes. It doesn't seem to exist in many music apps. I couldn't find an android app that does it, and spotify doesn't do it on any system. On desktop, It's possible to script spotify behavior, so with some work I was able to define a global keyboard shortcut to choose a random album and play it. Not perfect, but gets the job done.
- larrik 7y agoI would say what people usually want is "I want my playlist shuffled in a way that feels like variety". But, I don't have any data to back that up ;)
- winternett 7y agoMost music player developers assume our music collections are small I guess, and they're trying to encourage cloud storage rather than local saved files as well possibly, because it generates money by encouraging music sales, storage upgrades, and monthly subscriptions.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- winternett 7y agoGood point... I mainly dont want to hear a playlist that starts with the same tune every time and then progresses through the same order of tunes when I select Random. So often, in Google Play Music selecting random will play any of of 10 pre-set playlist cues.... The tunes will be a mix of one big polaylist that just starts at various points on the master playlist. This is why I often run across the same tunes, and why they follow each other in the exact same order. e.g. Normal Play Cue: A-B-C-D-E-F-G Random is selected - Random play attenpt 1. B-A-C-D-F-G-E (Several tunes present on the micro SD card never play) Random play attenpt 2. F-G-E-B-A-C-D (Several tunes present on the micro SD card never play) Random play attenpt 3. B-F-G-E-A-G-E (Several tunes present on the micro SD card never play) I prefer the "Shuffle" feature I guess if you want to look at the semantic side of this discussion, where not tune is played twice or in the same order whenever the random button is pressed, and every time I press random, the player should recall the last tune, and pick a new playable tune each time the skip button is pressed or after the prior tune comes to an end.
- nickthegreek 7y ago#2 seems like it should be the default but I feel I normally get #4.
- Fellshard 7y agoAlso, "I want 'random' songs that are musically appealing to hear in sequence." A sort of lite DJ logic, really; not necessarily modifying the songs' entrances and exits, but more selecting keys and tempos.
- kleer001 7y agoFrom what I remember, Pandora did that really well. It's been a while since I've used it, but their classification system was really cool.
- Renevith 7y agoYes, this is still true, and it's great. Within the songs and artists that typically play on my Pandora stations, it will play similar songs in clusters, with the exception that it won't play the exact same artist twice in close succession. This makes the playlist a lot better (in my opinion). The only quirk I've noticed is when the same person has multiple bands... I've had it play Jack White or Les Claypool 4 times in a row, for example.
- saltcured 7y agoThat's funny, I don't like how Pandora works on the custom stations I've tried to build. It feels too much like it is going through the set of seed artists in some repeating order, playing a batch of similar items to one seed before switching to the next batch. I'd much rather have these sub-genres woven together with changing styles at each track boundary, as a sort of counterpoint. If I can remember all the way back to when I used to make my own "mix tapes" transferred from vinyl records, I think I used to do this sort of interleaving. So, I think my preference existed before I ever experienced the shuffle of a 5 or 10 disc Sony CD changers, which usually changed discs on every track change and avoided any repeats until the entire set was done. Because of my preference for shuffle, I used to burn a CD or two for use in rental cars, where I added a pseudo-random prefix to the file names. This gave me a shuffled play when the in-dash player was set to just play sequentially, so I didn't have to discover a random mode with repeats in one particular car...
- ghostly_s 7y agoUm, no? I would argue most people would say they want 1 or 2, and the rest of those are mostly things that developers convince themselves are adequate substitutes for these things.
- Godel_unicode 7y agoWe made a music system for the office I worked at a few years back; all of these options came up as possible meanings of "random". We ended up with a system where people could vote on which random they wanted, and all of them got used over the course of a few months. 3 and 4 were very popular. It also sparked a lively debate about whether people actually wanted what they said they wanted or were just being difficult. People are weird and English is imprecise.
- jayd16 7y agoDon't forget that the sufflers will often try to match song outros and intros so they seamlessly cross-fade. This could have the appearance of #4.
- gpvos 7y agoCan you name shufflers which actually do this?
- majormajor 7y agoSmart playlists in iTunes were great for solving 5 and 6 with separate auto-updated playlists, but sadly Spotify has no interest in this problem. I hate the trend from product managers of responding to "wow there's a lot of things people might be intending here" with "let's just pick one in the name of simplicity." Give me the hooks to let me make my own solutions for the other possibilities!
- tsukikage 7y agoTo be fair, Spotify do in fact give you the hooks: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/ https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/ You can have a script sitting on your machine remotely controlling an internet connected player somewhere else. e.g. here's one I wrote that makes Spotify not play the same track too often: https://github.com/sl236/spotify-deduplicator https://github.com/sl236/spotify-deduplicator
- drngdds 7y agoWhat I want is to have the options laid out before be so I can pick which one I want. Spotify and friends seem to go with a "fuck you, we know what you want better than you do" approach, which is one of many reasons I prefer to own my music instead of streaming it.
- uslic001 7y agoI want #2 but most players do not do this. Both Amazon Music and Google Play fail although Amazon does a better job at giving me #2. Sometimes it will give me a different random order but sometimes it gives me the same order as it did last time I asked it to shuffle the playlist. To get it to resent the random shuffle I have to manually close down Amazon Music and restart it. Then it resets the shuffle.
- OJFord 7y ago> 3. I want it to "seem" random (don't play too many songs by the same artist in a row). That can still be random, for as long as we're not defining the variable: from $artists choose artist randomly from $artist.repertoire choose song randomly play $song and then of course with the #2 variation on both variables.
- kbenson 7y agoYou will get very weird results from that depending on your song library. If you have every song from a prolific artist, and one to two songl you like from a few other artists, you'll get a nice random distribution among artists, but not among your library. For very lopsided libraries, such as people that just started a service and maybe have added one or two full artist catalogues and a smattering of other songs they like that they thought of (which I imagine isn't all that uncommon, it's the state I commonly find myself in on a new service), it will result in a lot of repeats and ignoring a bunch of your library.
- kstenerud 7y ago80% of people mean this: I don't want to hear the same song too soon after hearing it before. How soon is "too soon"? Probably anywhere from 50 to 200 songs. Easiest solution that gets you 99% there would be to make a shuffled list, run through the whole thing, then shuffle again. The only reason why this wasn't done in the past was lack of RAM, which isn't an issue anymore. Or if RAM really actually is an issue on your embedded device, use a Debruijn sequence.
- ilikehurdles 7y agoDo you have a source for that claim? For me, random means: "I want to hear every song in this selection exactly once, chosen randomly". Random should mean uniformly distributed and I don't care whether the same artist or album is played back-to-back. I feel like this is exactly what "shuffle" has meant for decades before some UX quack at Spotify headquarters decided they knew better.
- kstenerud 7y agoSo... what you're saying is that you don't want to hear the same song too soon after hearing it before?
- ilikehurdles 7y agoNo, I’m saying I want to hear every song in the list exactly once before any is repeated. Your summary is more generous than my definition.
- kstenerud 7y agoSo... You'd say that my summary gets you 80% of the way there?
- iforgotpassword 7y agoThat's shuffle, not random. Maybe randomized. With random, every song should have the same chance of being picked, which would technically allow the same song to play twice. If you'd let the player run for a decade, every song should have played about the same number of times. But this usually leads to people perceiving the feature as not being random enough. See Spotify for example: https://www.quora.com/Is-Spotifys-shuffle-feature-truly-random-I-keep-hearing-the-same-songs-in-my-library-too-often-for-it-to-be-a-mere-coincidence-Does-Spotify-use-some-kind-of-special-algorithm-to-determine-what-song-plays-If-so-why/answer/Mattias-Petter-Johansson https://www.quora.com/Is-Spotifys-shuffle-feature-truly-rand...
- TulliusCicero 7y agoExcellent post. Reminds me of the old Warcraft 3 days when some players would be like, "I got Undead four times in a row, this isn't random Bli$$ard!!!1"
- 13415 7y agoI would expect from a random playlist function to shuffle the playlist once randomly (or using a good PRNG with long period) whenever the function is called. Option 2 sounds closest to this, but there is no need to remove anything, the player always plays the next song in the list. It's odd to hear that this is not standard, given that it's a standard algorithm. Maybe memory limitations?
- Spooky23 7y agoThere’s another dimension... the playback mechanism. I think that some of these solutions actually make some sort of hidden playlist to accommodate garbage Bluetooth integrations in cars. I’ve definitely seen scenarios where I’ve heard the same random play order due to some fuckery with a car Bluetooth connection.
- mikeash 7y agoFurther complicating things, lots of people will say they want 1 or 2, but really want one of the others, because they don’t really understand what randomness looks like. Lots of music players started out with true randomness and then dialed it back because people complained that it wasn’t very random.
- gervu 7y agoBecause users never wanted mathematical randomness. They wanted variety. Not that saying "random" is wrong, but users mostly mean it in a colloquial sense, while programmers are apt to interpret it in a technical sense. But one leads to math.urandom() and the other to shuffle algorithms.
- rdiddly 7y agoTake that comment almost verbatim, and turn it into a menu in the options/config area, and you can have my money!
- dvt 7y agoI love this idea so much, I made it an issue on a the Lofi repo -- a somewhat popular Spotify player I built: https://github.com/dvx/lofi/issues/37 https://github.com/dvx/lofi/issues/37 I'll work on it when I can get a bit of free time.
- Nydhal 7y agoUsers want more control. Take this idea apply it to what shows up on your favorite social network feed/timeline.
- perfmode 7y agothe random function in itunes employs heuristics like this. specifically, it avoids multiple songs by same artist in a row.
- FussyZeus 7y agoI have no idea if this is possible, but it would be awesome to see Spotify implement some kind of learning algorithm that would run your playlists like a professional DJ would, lining them up in progression by tone, tempo, sound, etc. That would be amazing.
- jancsika 7y ago> 1. I want it to play in a truly random fashion, with replacement (same song twice in a row is possible). Anyone outside of HN would interpret that as broken random. So we can throw it out. > 2. I want it to play in a truly random fashion, without replacement (each song is removed from the list once played). Nope, not good enough for non-specialist randomness. > 3. I want it to "seem" random (don't play too many songs by the same artist in a row). Bingo. It should definitely seem random. Because the string "seem random" equals "random" for someone who isn't a technical expert in randomness. > 4. I want it to be random, but predictable (same "random" ordering if I start the playlist again). Normies don't care about random seeds for pseudorandom number generators, so nope. > 5. I want it to play my favourite songs more often than my lower-rated songs. That's a bonus feature that can be implemented with a slider. > 6. I want it to play my less-commonly played songs more often than the stuff I listen to all the time. Same as above > So: what exactly do you want when you say random? One obvious definition for normy random, plus a slider with least and most favorited at the left and right, respectively. Done.
- winternett 7y agoOr if the UI allowed me to easily play music based on which folders tunes are in, it would solve most of my problems... I already have my mp3s organized by genre in folders, and updates are easier to manage that way, and then random play can match my mood better, instead of going from wu-tang to Celine Dion (I also keep wedding music in my collection just in case...)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hnick 7y agoIn the 90s this would have been solved with a single radio button option in the settings menu. We've come so far with UI design now that we can't have that.
- winternett 7y agoThey should probably just revive winamp. Winamp really kicked the llama's a$$, and knew what random meant... And also knew how to have a good UI.
- bromuro 7y agoNice written! I have nothing to complain about Spotify. I also like to think they choose the next songs based on the sound of the last ones. Eg no heavy music after a yoga relaxing soundtrack. Maybe it is not the way i’d order my playlist, but I trust Spotify knows their stuff. There must be a lot of engineering there. Why not trusting the musical tastes of a robot, after all?
- c3534l 7y ago> I have nothing to complain about Spotify. I do. 1 and 2 aren't even options. I have playlists with 100 or so songs in it. I don't hate that I can predict what the next song will be. Smart Shuffle is fine, so long as you don't say it's random and you offer an actual shuffle button that works the way shuffle has worked since the introduction of the CD player.
- Haga 7y agoExactly random, the first one. Everything else is not random. I guess you're answer provides a indirect answer. We devs like to think up algos, which the users do not want. So these algos get shoved beneath the "I feel lucky" button hoping that nobody notices that his her shuffle was replaced with something beta. TL, dr: Bad product management, that didn't stop coders from featurecreeping
- mrfusion 7y ago4 basically causes the problems though. Who wants that!