Shuffle not so good at shuffling?

[slipper]

i just got a iPod shuffle and i noticed... it sucks at shuffling. Now ive owned 4 iPods in the past and ive never had any problems with the shuffle feature. Very often i would hear duplicate songs within 2 or 3 songs of play. The thing that made me notice was the other day i was listening to a particular artist. i only have 3 of his songs on my iTunes library and the 3 are in my Shuffle and the funny thing is it played it consecutively. and i noticed since then, it does it very very frequently.

anyone notice this?

 

[kgarner]

Haven't noticed this in my Shuffle. There have several article lately on just how random the iPod is. The best explanation I saw was that it is in fact totally random, but you have to look at from a large scale. We as humans try to impose some sort of order when there isn't any because it makes us feel better (we hate disorder), but whe you look at it over the course of a year or more, it is completely random.

That said, it sounds like yours is maybe a little funky. Do you have those songs rated? Do you have the play rated songs more frequently option checked? That could be part of the issue.

 

[Wyvernspirit]

i just got a iPod shuffle and i noticed... it sucks at shuffling. Now ive owned 4 iPods in the past and ive never had any problems with the shuffle feature. Very often i would hear duplicate songs within 2 or 3 songs of play. The thing that made me notice was the other day i was listening to a particular artist. i only have 3 of his songs on my iTunes library and the 3 are in my Shuffle and the funny thing is it played it consecutively. and i noticed since then, it does it very very frequently.

anyone notice this?

My fisrt thought is to ask: Did you make sure that it is set to shuffle? I believe there is a switch on the back that changes that setting. I could be wrong.

 

[rtdgoldfish]

My Shuffle is very good at shuffling. I autofill it every time I connect it to my iBook and I very rarely hear the same song twice. Maybe it has something to do with how many tracks are in your library?? I have 18+ gigs of music which comes out to about 6000 tracks. A smaller library would not be able to have as many selections so would seem like it is less random.

 

[Loge]

Someone needs to check if the iPod shuffle passes the diehard tests of statistical randomness.

http://random.com.hr/products/random/Diehard.html

I don't have a shuffle, so I can't check it.