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iTunes Random Order - Cool Coincidence?

Cooknn

Cooknn

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Aug 23, 2003
2,111
0
Fort Myers, FL
I fired up iTunes tonight with Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden. I almost always play my library with 'Random' so I thought it was cool when the second song was Audioslave's What You Are. Imagine my surprise when the third song of the evening was Take The Power Back by Rage Against The Machine :eek: ...my library is not loaded with any of those bands.

Does iTunes have a method to its random selection algorithm?
 
I don't think i see the pattern here...

But yeah, i've certainly noticed frequent patterns in my itunes randomizer. Usually it just completely avoids certain bands, and often plays only what i've been listening to recently.
 
I've always been curious about this also. Back when I had only a shuffle I could swear that I was hearing certain songs more often then others. One night I was bored so I exported the itunes data into excel and figured out the average number of plays per day (taking into account how long the song had been in my library). Since I always have the shuffle set to shuffle, never select songs individually, and limited my itunes library to a number of songs that would entirelly fit on the shuffle I assumed that they should all be about equal. While about 60% of them were played about as often, there was still a sizable number that were played more frequently then the rest. I don't know whats going on. And I still think that I'm going crazy... it turns out the songs I thought I was hearing more often were actually playing at a relatively regular frequency. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to live with this on my new 5G :) Oh the things we have to put up with...
 
panoz7 said:
While about 60% of them were played about as often, there was still a sizable number that were played more frequently then the rest. I don't know whats going on.
Click to expand...

That's what you would expect to see with randomness - you wouldn't be able to play your shuffle enough times in your life to see them even out.

If all songs were played the same number of times after a few days (say 10 times each) that's a sign that the algorithm is not random.
 
topgunn said:
I don't get it.
Click to expand...
The singer from Soundgarden (Chris Cornell-- is that how you spell his name?) ended working together with the band members of RATM (Rage Against the Machine-- minus their original singer) to form a new group called Audioslave.

That's why it's eerily cool that the OP's iTunes played one song from each of the intertwined bands.
 
devilot said:
The singer from Soundgarden (Chris Cornell-- is that how you spell his name?) ended working together with the band members of RATM (Rage Against the Machine-- minus their original singer) to form a new group called Audioslave.

That's why it's eerily cool that the OP's iTunes played one song from each of the intertwined bands.
Click to expand...

How did I not put that together! :)
 
itunes synchronicity

So I have also wondered about whether iTunes shuffle was truly random. A few months ago I was reading a text message from my friend Caroline while in the background I had iTunes running. As I was reading the message, Sweet Caroline from Neil Diamond followed by Caroline from The Beach Boys was played. I want to chalk it up as pure synchronicity, but I wouldn't put it past the Apple engineers to have created algorithms that took into account the users environment variables when generating the random playlist when in shuffle mode.
 
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