I have more music all of a sudden!
I dunno what they did with iTunes 4.5, but all of a sudden I'm listening to songs I have *NEVER* heard before in my 5000song collection (that have always been there).
I have always used Shuffle and songs DID get kind of redundant... it felt like I was always hearding the same few hundred songs.
Weird.
I have always used Shuffle and songs DID get kind of redundant... it felt like I was always hearding the same few hundred songs.
Weird.
Comments
i'll have to play around with the shuffle option and see if i start hearing albums i thought had faded into memory.
Or else it's picked a new set of favorites and I just haven't had the update long enough to notice.
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The usual tradeoff is speed vs. randomness (as anyone who remembers old school video games can testify - their pseudo-random algorithms were frequently lame, and their sequences predictable). It's quite likely, given the iPod's cellphone-like processing power and its need to shuffle lots of songs quickly, that Apple picked a fairly bad - but really fast - algorithm to start with, and they've been steadily massaging it since then as they update and tighten up the software.
One interesting way around this is actually to have an analog white noise generator of some description, and sample it whenever you need a random number. I doubt the iPod does that, though.
sorry... I just finished reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson last week... awesome book. Made me want to install GPG on my Mac and make a nice 2048bit key.
Paranoia cha-cha-cha
To stay on track, I also want to go on record to say that with the iPod 2.2 update, randomness seems as good as with iTunes 4.5. Im hearing more different music.
i tried party shuffle out yesterday and went from:
propellerheads-to-the rolling stones-to-craig david-to-michael jackson-to-the cars,
i was like, wow that was an odd combination...
but it was good because it exposed me to songs i never played much like the "boston" album, i love "rock n roll band" i found that i gave that album almost all 5 stars! and michael jackson NAILED the song "butterflies" i had never heard it before, and now its a favorite.
and when bruce hornsby's "try anything once" first started up i thought it was a rap tune! (i have party shuffle setup to hide the next song coming up so i can be surprised, and i was)
and belive it or not i actually made my FIRST playlist yesterday as well. i had never used the function before and made a "bookmark" list called "songs to buy" as i browsed the store. pretty neat function.
I wanted to see how random shuffle really was, but iTunes kept going back to the same artists and same albums. I've got 6,200 songs, there is no reason 1/5 of the songs on shuffle are off one album. iTunes also seems to have inherited the iPod's shuffle bug where if you pick the same song to start, the progression will be the same.
Shuffle is now completely useless to me. I did a little testing and only 50 albums are being selected for shuffle. If a song is not on one of those 50 albums it will not play at all from my library of 747 albums. I've sent a report to Apple about this, but seems like I'm the only one having this problem.
Torture me if you must</Mel_Gibson>
Originally posted by HOM
Anyone else noticing that the 'new' shuffle sucks as much as the old one?
I wanted to see how random shuffle really was, but iTunes kept going back to the same artists and same albums. I've got 6,200 songs, there is no reason 1/5 of the songs on shuffle are off one album. iTunes also seems to have inherited the iPod's shuffle bug where if you pick the same song to start, the progression will be the same.
Ouch. Using the first song as the seed for the pseudo-random algorithm? That's just cheap.
There's a clock on there, for Steve's sake. Use that!