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Why isn't iTunes shuffle random?
- rprospero 14y agoI remember when the iPod first came out and was truly random. People would notice that song X came up twice before having played song Y and conclude that the iPod wasn't truly random. There was a big thing on Slashdot about how the record labels were paying off Apple to weight certain songs more heavily in the shuffle for their own nefarious purposes. Then again, my memory isn't what it used to be, so maybe the Slashdot crowd was right about that one and I just forgot.
- dsirijus 14y agoProbably the same reason iPhone camera output is filtered (or any other technical term that ends up with photos looking better than they really are). I had my doubts WinAMPs shuffle was acting on some heuristics, though I never bothered to check.
- falling 14y agoPutting aside the fact that all photos ever from any camera (not even just digital ones) are always filtered, what do you mean by "looks better than they actually are"? How is that possible? A photo either looks good (to a specific person) or it doesn't and that makes it a good picture (fr that person) or not.
- powrtoch 14y agoThe top answer is good, but it doesn't explain why iTunes couldn't maintain the seed while skipping forward and back, but reshuffle whenever a new song is selected, or whenever iTunes is restarted, or whenever you switch to a playlist and back, or all the other times you wouldn't expect it to maintain the sort order. So this still seems like something that Apple could (and should) really improve on without breaking important functionality.
- Terretta 14y agoIn all those "why doesn't it reshuffle" scenarios you mention, I would then have to hear same tracks again. I don't want to. I want to hear everything, some today, some tomorrow, some next week, until I've heard it all. Unless I do want to hear things again, in which case I toggle the Shuffle button. By design, I decide. Rebooting, restarting iTunes, picking a particular song then going back to my long playlist, those don't decide for me.
- derefr 14y agoIdeally, what I'd want is a button that generates a new, temporary, randomly-reordered playlist from another playlist, representing it as a virtual child (if I had, say, a "Vacation music" playlist, it would have a child node "Vacation music shuffled with seed 6e43bf".) The virtual playlist would also represent differently the songs that have been listened to since the playlist was created, from the ones that haven't--say, by putting a strike-through through them and greying them out slightly, or something. That way, if I get a whim to listen to one particular song half-way through listening to the shuffle-list, I can go listen to it, then return to the shuffle-list and listen to the rest of it, without having to hear any of the same songs again. This would also allow for the child to track modifications of the parent--if you remove a song from the parent playlist, it would also disappear from the child (unless, perhaps, you had already listened to it; then the child could keep it as a record); and if you add a song to the parent playlist, it would get inserted at a random position within the still-as-yet-unlistened partition of the child. This is sort of what iTunes DJ will do, if work off a smart playlist based on the playlist you want to listen to, but which defines some criterion by which songs you've listened to won't come up again--for example, if you're listening to songs to give them ratings, you can define the smart playlist to only be the unrated songs in the original playlist; then each song will be removed from shuffle-selection once you've rated it. Still, the simplest thing to do is to just set a playlist to shuffle, make sure the list view is sorted by playlist-order (the unlabeled leftmost column), and then Ctrl+A, Ctrl+Shift+N to copy the shuffled list into a new playlist, and delete songs from it as you listen to them. It's too bad this is an impossible proposition on a portable device.
- thought_alarm 14y agoiTunes does reshuffle when switching playlists.
- igorgue 14y agoI remember on the Banshee mailing list a while ago (with fear to be corrected here right now) a discussion about how randomness should work. They implemented some awesome random options though: Random by album and random by artist. So you can play different albums or different artists all the time. But a really random playlist, really sucks. You get incredibly random stuff, e.g.: the same artist 5 times in a row or sometimes, the very same song.
- egb 14y agoI got tired of hearing the same songs over and over during my train rides, so I wrote an app that plays your songs with no repeats ever until you've heard them all. http://itunes.apple.com/app/true-shuffle-pro/id355913111?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/app/true-shuffle-pro/id355913111?mt=... , if you're interested. I priced it high on the theory that people with lots of music have already put hundreds or thousands of dollars into their music collections and wouldn't mind spending a little to enjoy all their songs in a useful way. I actually tried a free version at one point and it sold the same number of copies as the $4.99 version, so I ditched it and just have the paid version. EDIT - Don't want to feel spammy here, and wasn't going to include a link to my app, but for those who do want a "listen to all my songs with no repeats" solution, True Shuffle does the job. Hit me up for a promo code if you need one, eh.
- xshoppyx 14y agoiTunes will play all of your songs without repeats until you have heard them all as-is. A user would simply go to their music collection, select the shuffle action, and then begin playing a song. No song will be repeated until all of them have been played, which you should have been able to take away if you read the OP or the comment thread. As for the fact that your app is $5, I will refrain from saying anything besides do not spam the link to it on HN please.
- jesseendahl 14y agoI also recall Steve Jobs explaining in a keynote once that they had made the shuffle feature less random in response to user feedback about not wanting to hear the same song twice in a listening period. Aha... just found what I was thinking of. Quote from article: As humans, when we come across random clusters we naturally superimpose a pattern. We instinctively project an order on the chaos. It's part of our psychological make-up. For example, when the iPod first came out and people started to use the shuffle feature, which plays songs in a random order, many people complained that it didn't work. They said that too often songs from the same album, or the same artist, came up one after another. Yet that's what randomness does - it creates counter-intuitively dense clusters. In response to complaints from users, Apple CEO Steve Jobs changed the programming behind the feature: 'We're making it (the shuffle) less random to make it feel more random.' In other words, each new song now has to be significantly different from what came before, so as to conform to our expectation of randomness. Which isn't really random at all. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1334712/Humans-concept-randomness-hard-understand.html#ixzz21pzqiW5O http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1334712/Huma...
- danudey 14y ago>In other words, each new song now has to be significantly different from what came before, so as to conform to our expectation of randomness. Which isn't really random at all. That's the trouble with randomness. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/
- jerf 14y agoI like to say "Random is blotchy". If we mean "uniformly randomly chosen with fully independent choices", smoothness is proof that it's not that sort of random. This comes up surprisingly often. For instance, the mere presence of clusters of some non-communicable disease or something prove diddly. It must be shown that the clusters are unexpectedly large, not merely that they exist. Of course they exist. That's the default presumption.
- xsmasher 14y agoI remember complaints of the form "My iPod really loves Steely Dan." I can't find the original article, but it's excerpted here: http://gadgetopia.com/post/5580 http://gadgetopia.com/post/5580
- Evbn 14y agoNeeds a "2006" tag, as this was thoroughky discussed when the first few releases of iTunes came out.
- mrspandex 14y agoI really like the way Winamp handles shuffle. It takes the current playlist (whatever is selected to play), then shuffles it in memory for stable play order. If you select a new song manually, it will play that song, then resume the old play order.
- chimeracoder 14y agoI use ncmpcpp (a client for mpd) and it does the same thing. I've never had any issues with its shuffling; it just works exactly as I would expect it to for everything.
- tsahyt 14y agoOn a sidenote, mpd + ncmpcpp is a killer combination for playing and managing music. I can only recommend that to anybody geeky enough to use a CLI music player :)
- dllthomas 14y agoIt sounds like it's a naming issue. It's not "shuffle mode" - there's a shuffle action.
- cwe 14y agoThis is the best, simplest way to describe what's going on. Well said. Personally, I think this is the ideal behavior. I want a random playlist, but want to play through the whole thing as time goes on. Pure shuffle would give me a new playlist every time I went to a podcast or some other random song, whereas shuffling a playlist means I can go back to where I was in that random list, and not worry about hearing the same stuff again.
- kennon 14y agoIf that's the case, then there's also a bit of a UI issue. The current shuffle button is a toggle, not a "click once each time you want to shuffle" button.
- dllthomas 14y agoYes, for sure. My speculation (from vague recollections of ancient Slashdot posts I didn't read closely at the time - never having used iAnything for music myself - so take it with a grain of salt) is that shuffle started out randomly picking the next song, but people complained that IT WASN'T RANDOM because they kept hearing the same songs - but of course if it is random, there's no protection against precisely that, and the people for whom it has happened to be well distributed probably arent' going online searching for "itunes shuffle randomness problem" or whatnot. So there may or may not have been a bug in the randomness, but randomness isn't really what people wanted anyway, and upon realizing that they changed it to the way it works now - where you shuffle it like a deck of cards, and then run through that deck repeatedly. Now, shuffle is an action where before it was a mode - and they forgot to change the UI to match.
- farnsworth 14y agoYes, but you still need to be able to "unshuffle", so they kept it as a toggle. not the most natural ui, but it works.
- user49598 14y agoI think this is one of those problems where smart people think too hard. It has nothing to do with non engineers misunderstanding randomness or the human mind intrinsically superimposing structure. All it has to do with is being an algorithmic dj. Users don't want a random playlist. They want their songs shuffled, and they want them shuffled in a way that keeps songs from the same album distributed far apart. No one presses the shuffle button to get satisfaction out of pure randomness. They press the button because they want to listen to music. If think your users are dumb because they don't understand randomness then you don't understand the job that shuffle is supposed to do.
- JonnieCache 14y agoExactly. People want their expectations and their pattern matching processes to be confounded, and randomness, counterintuitively, will not do that.
- ajross 14y agoI think that's right, but stated wrong. :) Randomness does confound our expectations. But what it does not do is confound them consistently. It's routine for a random order to play the same song twice in near succession ("I just heard this yesterday, and I have 2000 songs in this thing!"), etc... But none of that really gets to the linked article, which is that iTunes was using a fixed shuffle order.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ChillyWater 14y agoYou see the same thing when laying tile. If you have a small field tile with fancy glass accents or whatever, the customer really wants random uniformity, not pure random.
- kstenerud 14y agoThis is something any game programmer can tell you. Pure randomness in a game kills the fun. You have to shape the randomness to match human expectation.
- joshuahedlund 14y agoI solved this problem by creating a smart playlist that only includes songs I haven't heard in X days. I actually went further and made it include 5-star songs I haven't played in X days, 4-star in X weeks, and 3-star in X months. I hear the songs I like the most, but the constantly updated list prevents the "random" shuffle algorithm from picking the same songs too often.
- delinka 14y agoThis wasn't the question I thought it was. It's actually "why don't things get reshuffled when I expect?" The answer to the stated question is: because randomness clumps and plays too many songs from the same album/artist/wtfe and bugs people. See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4301922 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4301922
- pavel_lishin 14y agoThe bigger problem is that if I select a single album, tell it to shuffle, and click play, it hardly EVER plays the entire album. I've had it play two songs and stop.
- nicholassmith 14y agoOne of the more interesting things I've heard about iTunes/iPod shuffling is the phrase 'it knows me so well', obviously every shuffle isn't a win, but I'm guessing it's not just seeding it pseudo-randomly but also applying some specific constraints on the playlist. I don't realllly like completely random shuffles as jazz into techno isn't the smoothest transition, but I've never really seen that with iTunes.
- Craiggybear 14y agoI like RandomPlay or CMUS in preference to iTunes. Their randomness is more suited to my collection. Both on Linux and OS X. But what I love more than anything is listening to the playlist on FiP, any time of the day. Their programming is pure genius.
- msg 14y agoI observed this with Google Music too. Nirvana is underrepresented in my music collection (1-2% tops) but I seem to hear multiple Nirvana songs every time I log in and shuffle all (4-6 hour period). I have wondered if Google Music is picking music that is related to previously heard music. But I have no way to check without looking at the source. Until Google Music gets smart playlists, I have no recourse I guess.
- Steko 14y agoNot mentioned but I think the randomness is also not equally weighted, 5 star songs will show up way more then lower rated songs. A few years back someone gathered a large dataset of shuffles and plays with songs clipped to a second or less.
- jopt 14y agoI find that hard to believe. The songs are actually "shuffled," in the same sense as a deck of cards is. One a song is "drawn" from the shuffled deck, it is not put back until the deck is exhausted and shuffled again. So in any shuffle, each song must show up exactly once. There's a setting in iTunes DJ, however, to "play higher rated songs more often."
- Steko 14y agoYep thanks, I was confusing features there. This appears to be the article I was remembering (caveat: it's from way back in 2005): http://www.omninerd.com/articles/How_Much_Does_iTunes_Like_My_Five_Star_Songs http://www.omninerd.com/articles/How_Much_Does_iTunes_Like_M...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- yason 14y agoWho expects shuffling to be random sampling and not shuffling? All shuffle modes I've ever encountered have shuffled the playlist or songs on a compact disc and then played them in the once-randomized order.
- stevewillows 14y agoI had a similar issue with Foobar until I realized that 'random' meant 'won't play song twice in a row' while 'shuffle' was more of a 'won't play song again until everything else is played'.
- LilValleyBigEgo 14y agoCNET did a study a while back where they proved more or less conclusively that iTunes plays songs by certain studios (studios that Apple happened to have partnerships with) more often: http://www.cnet.com.au/itunes-just-how-random-is-random-339274094.htm http://www.cnet.com.au/itunes-just-how-random-is-random-3392...
- cowpewter 14y agoAlso, back when iPods had platter harddrives, if it predetermines the whole shuffle order in advance, the iPod can load the few next songs into memory and not have to spin the harddrive up as often. Saved a lot of battery.
- Evbn 14y agoNote that "shuffle" isn't "random". A mathematically "perfect shuffle" of a deck of cards is not random at all, but still provides a pleasing distribution.
- wangweij 14y agoIf the major reason for this behavior is so that you can press back to play the previous song, it can simply remember a short period of history.