It's Random, They Swear

lame

Posted by: markilous at 09/19/05 3:02 PM | Reply
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Straight from the new iTunes 5 preferences.

Smart Shuffle:

more likely | random | less likely

Smart shuffle allows you to control how likely you are to hear multiple songs in a row by the same artist or from the same album.

Posted by: seiche at 09/19/05 3:07 PM | Reply
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"Oh. I am here, in a sense, because Mrs. Tenney, the vicar's wife, has become sloppy, and forgotten to close her eyes when she takes the balls out of the bingo machine."

Posted by: Decklin Foster at 09/19/05 3:14 PM | Reply
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sorry, i'm not buying it. i don't care what the math says, when a band with 12 out of my 6000 songs shows up 3 times in one hour... that ain't random.

Posted by: Dashiell at 09/19/05 3:28 PM | Reply
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Yeah, I call 'shenanigans' as well. If the recurrance happened once in all the times I've used shuffle play I'd be willing to buy it. But it happens too often to seem random.

I have mused that Apple called it 'Shuffle' instead of 'Random' for this reason.

Posted by: Paulie [eatl/ga] at 09/19/05 3:45 PM | Reply
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I just flipped a coin twice and it came up heads both times. OMG WTF. I'm calling the federal reserve...

Posted by: hook at 09/19/05 3:49 PM | Reply
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just for the record, stereogum readers are calling shenanigans on a computer scientist.

anyways, i still wanna know how come my ipod can read my mind and play the song i'm thinking of like 70% of the time.

Posted by: george at 09/19/05 4:07 PM | Reply
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BECAUSE APPLE HAS PLANTED CHIPS IN OUR HEADS.

Honestly, whocares. iShuffle is rubbish. ipod nano is the new ipod mini.

Posted by: calliwell at 09/19/05 4:18 PM | Reply
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It's Big Brother once again, and once again the fucker is out to get us...........

Posted by: Johnny Appleseed at 09/19/05 4:27 PM | Reply
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Yeah, because computer science has never failed us. Ever.

Posted by: Dashiell at 09/19/05 4:52 PM | Reply
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It's not that hard to figure out the probablity that multiple songs from the same artist will show up near eachother. Just go down to your local library and pick up a combinatorics book. Read through the first two or three chapters and by then you should know enough to use the provided formulas and a little critical thought to figure it out. You'll find out the the probability of a song by the same artist coming up within a few songs is actually fairly high.

And doing it for yourself will give you a good feel for the material rather than just getting a number.

Posted by: some guy at 09/19/05 5:20 PM | Reply
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George Bush doesn't care about iPod Shufflers!

Posted by: mike at 09/19/05 6:26 PM | Reply
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Actually, he doesn't care about black nanos.

Posted by: Jim at 09/19/05 6:28 PM | Reply
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I know at an intuitive level it might seem unlikely, but the odds are better than you think that you'll hear songs by the same artist in shuffle mode.

Let me break it down for you:

Given:
500 artists in your library, each with an equal number of songs (unlikely, I know, but bear with me)
songs are 4 minutes long on average
You play the ipod for 1 hour in shuffle mode so you hear 15 songs

If you hear 15 songs, by the combinations rule there are 105 possible pairs of songs that could be by the same artist (e.g. song 3 could be by the same artist as song 5 or song 1 could be by the same artist as song 8 and so on; there are 105 such possibilities).

Given 500 artists and 105 possible pairs when listening to 15 songs, is it easier to see now that the actual odds of hearing 2 songs by the same artist in the course of an hour is likelier than you might think?

In my example, the odds are ~19% that at least 2 of the songs you hear will be by the same artist.
p(x)=1-e^-(105/500)=~.19

Also, you only have to listen to 27 songs for it to be likelier than not that 2 of the songs will be by the same artist.

Read this for more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox

Posted by: Stats 101 at 09/19/05 8:41 PM | Reply
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honestly, who really cares? its an effing random shuffle. if ya dont like it, click it again.

Posted by: alexi at 09/19/05 10:35 PM | Reply
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I care very much.

Stat Boy, no one has a music collection where all artists are equally represented. That's the whole point. When The Beatles (who I have a lot of) show up twice in an hour, that's not a surprise. When the Indigo Girls (yeah, that's right I said it) show up twice, that's a headscratcher.

In either case, my argument is not that it can't happen. Instead it's my belief that the algorithm Apple uses does not generate true randomness. And if you prove to me that it does, I still won't believe you because I'm a stubborn, closed-minded prick.

Posted by: Dashiell at 09/20/05 2:27 AM | Reply
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What you are missing is a very important point. All Arcade Fire songs sound the same. You might think it is the 3rd, 4th or 16th Arcade Fire song but you iPod just thinks it's all one long, horrific song. Your iPod has actually switched itself into an iComma while it uses a radix sort algorithm to find good music like Pretty Ricky or Ashlee Simpson. Fuck, your iPod would even settle for something by KFed himself. What ever happened to Ron Artest's album? Anyone know?

Posted by: phuker at 09/20/05 12:59 PM | Reply
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I don't find that the problem is so much that the same artists get played in one sitting; I find that the same songs get played every time I put my iTunes on shuffle. In other words, I play a song, click shuffle, and then it plays, say, 10 songs before I get up from my computer and turn it off. When I come back and start the process all over again, I get at least 2 or 3 of those same songs on my new shuffle. For a library with over 2,000 songs, that just seems odd to me.

Posted by: Silvio at 09/20/05 9:24 PM | Reply
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