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My particular axe to grind here: car manufacturers seem to be unable to create a usable random function on audio players. There's (almost literally) nothing wor
by flavor8 13y ago
My particular axe to grind here: car manufacturers seem to be unable to create a usable random function on audio players. There's (almost literally) nothing worse than hearing Bohemian Rhapsody 6 times on a road trip (out of 2500 songs, with 200 played). "Random" (applied to audio playlists) doesn't really mean random (even assuming they're seeding their RNG properly) - it means shuffle, which requires maintaining a list somewhere in memory, which is probably why they don't bother doing it.
- logfromblammo 13y agoRandom selection of track and random ordering of the playlist is not the same thing. People usually want the latter. They often get the former with a car audio player. It's even worse when the random track is not even produced from a good pseudorandom number generator. In order to preserve the back/forward button functionality, the "random" selection may be seeded as a function of the current track number and the system clock date. So you end up with a choice between the native playlist and the player's playlist of the day. The only reason I can think of for making your hardware do such things is that you don't care about the user experience as much as you care about the $0.15 cost per unit it would take to make the function work in even a 3/4-assed way.