Can iPod learn? Apple iPod's Shuffle feature seems not so r...

[MacBytes]

Category: Opinion/Interviews
Link: Can iPod learn? Apple iPod\'s Shuffle feature seems not so random to some (http://www.macbytes.com/link.php?sid=20040826154002)
Posted on MacBytes.com (http://www.macbytes.com)

Approved by Mudbug

[mlw1235]

Could be, but most likely not. Why would apple spend time and money to make a "smart shuffle"?? :confused:

I, for one, don't use the shuffle mode...

[dotnina]

I don't know about the iPod, but I think they've done a great job w/shuffling in iTunes.

[stoid]

Nope, I listened to shuffle on my iPod for an hour, and it didn't get a single thing 'right'. I had to go through 84 songs to find enough to listen to.

[nagromme]

Of course shuffle could be improved. (Especially Party Shuffle tends to duplicate.)

Simple method: make the random shuffler NOT play songs that have played in the last n songs of the session. Where n is 25% of the current playlist. (You can do this with Smart Playlists in fact.)

There, I did the R&D and saved Apple all that money :)

[TomSmithMacEd]

I really do think there is something about Apple's shuffle that works, I don't know if it is just me thinking wrong or what, but when you don't change the song for a while, it finds a song that is like it next.... Who knows.

[0 and A ai]

the shuffle is crazy on my ipod

it friggin repeats plenty of songs

[painimies]

It's not just the iPod shuffle. The iTunes shuffle is also magical. It's almost scary.
Just yesterday I had iTunes shuffle my whole library of about 3000 songs. I had some friends come over and I thought if I should make a custom playlist to hear a certain Tony Joe White song we had been talking about.
Guess what was the very next song iTunes played?
Yep, that exact tune.

And this was just the tip of the iceberg. I have a strong feeling that iPod/iTunes somehow actually reads my mind.

[nagromme]

It's human to see pattern in randomness--like faces in clouds, shapes in fire, etc. True randomness WILL have some repetition and some "lucky" coincidences.

And computers aren't truly random, they just generate pseudo-randome numbers from complex formulas--but still mathematically determined. The way around that is to have an external source of randomness in the formula: such as when I want a true random number, I read the mouse's x and y coordinates and the current time, and mix those in. That adds a human factor.

An ideal shuffle would SEEM more random but not be truly random--it would avoid the repeats that true randomness allows.

[shamino]

It's human to see pattern in randomness--like faces in clouds, shapes in fire, etc. True randomness WILL have some repetition and some "lucky" coincidences.
Bingo!

Back in high school, I wrote a blackjack game on my Apple II. The dealer always seemed to get lucky - almost as if it was specifically picking cards designed to make me lose as much as possible. Except that having written the program, I knew full well that the program could not possibly be cheating. The code for drawing cards was completely unaware of the cards already drawn. (I was using an infinite deck in this program, so each draw is simply a random number from 0 to 12.)

Humans really can't deal with things that are truly random. If there is no pattern, we will invent one. You will remember those events that fit the pattern and forget those that don't fit.

And this is what people are seeing in their iPods.

[shamino]

An ideal shuffle would SEEM more random but not be truly random--it would avoid the repeats that true randomness allows.
Despite what I just wrote, I think there are ways to improve the shuffle.

A truly random algorithm would simply pick a random song - with a 1/n chance of getting any particular song. And with such an algorithm, you will notice repeats - that is the nature of being random.

A better solution would involve randomly shuffling the entire list, and then playing it through from start to finish. At the end, shuffle again. You may notice something playing twice if it happens to end up at the end of the previous list and at the start of the next list, but it would prevent repeats until you've heard everything once.

Apple says that this is what they're doing. But they probably generate the list when you click "play". If you quit/restart iTunes, it probably re-generates the list. So you may notice repeats - for the same reason a truly random algorithm would produce repeats.

One interesting solution would be to save the sequence and your current position to disk, only regenerating the list when you get to the end of it, when you add new songs, or when you explicitly toggle shuffle mode off/on again. But I'm sure this would produce other problems - not the least of which would be a huge disk file if you've got thousands of songs.

Biassing it in favor of songs that haven't been recently played might be interesting, but you can come pretty close to this with a smart playlist. Just make a playlist that contains the n least-recently played songs, or a random selection of songs not played in the last [n] days.

More interesting might be to bias the sequence by the inverse of the song length. In other words, have a 3 minute song show up 6 times as often as an 18 minute song. I could see this as a desirable feature. You can sort of approximate this with a set of smart playlists, (e.g. one with songs under 4 minutes, one for 4-8 minute songs, one for 8-16 minutes and one for longer than 16 minutes. Then make a smart playlist that picks 80 random songs from the first group, 40 from the second group, and 20 from the third group and 10 from the fourth group.) but it would only be a rough approximation of the effect.

[Daveman Deluxe]

I love Paul Thurrott's take on this phenomenon:

"Just a thought, but maybe the shuffle software is poorly written. I've noticed this sort of thing on the iPod, but not on the Dell DJ, and I think it's a bit more nefarious than this article suggests: When you start shuffling music on the iPod, it seems to return to the same artist and even album again and again for some reason. So if you hear a song by one group, you'll hear another by the same group shortly, even though there are songs by hundreds of groups on the device. And it's happened on each of my three iPods. Which makes sense, because...

"'Stan Ng, Apple Computer's director of iPod product marketing ... said that the technology behind the Shuffle function has remained the same since the first-generation iPod. He declined to reveal the algorithm used to generate randomness on Shuffle ... "The funny thing about it is that it really is random," he said. "When you turn on Shuffle Songs, it creates a randomized list of all the music on your iPod without repeating a song."'"

Sometimes I agree with Paul Thurrott, but this time he's gone off the deep end. Steps for creating a Paul Thurrott blog post:

1. Find some "problem" with something made by Apple.
2. Blame the problem on Apple's connections with EL DIABLO.
3. Quote some Apple insider as to the nature of the problem.
4. (optional) Quote same Apple insider completely disproving the rest of the post.

[dizastor]

My iPod tells me to kill people... anyone else have that feature?

*twitch*