The Perception of 'Random' on the iPod

Robaato writes "Stephen Levy writes in the Guardian about the perception of randomness, or the lack thereof, on an iPod set to shuffle." From the article: "My first iPod loved Steely Dan. So do I. But not as much as my iPod did.... I didn't keep track of every song that played every time I shuffled my tunes, but after a while I would keep a sharp ear out for what I came to call the LTBSD (Length of Time Before Steely Dan) Factor. The LTBSD Factor was always perplexingly short." My first iPod shuffle refused to let me delete (sigh) Weird Al's Polkamon off of the flash memory.

Never true randomness

[linuxci]

Well you'll never get true randomness but I used to notice this in mp3 playing software a lot of times particularly winamp seemed to play some tracks a lot more than others when on random.

On Linux I used to use a command line player and a nice structure of directories and symlinks to make the playlists and never used to bother with random.

Now I do most of my work on a Mac, but I also happen to listen to music less now, so random is now random enough for me.

Anyway, slow news day of what, this is the second pointless ipod story I read today on here :)

I like ipods, I have one but only ever use it on long journeys and no I don't have DRM'd tracks so I didn't care about online music purchases. The ipod just happened to be the one that worked the best (scrollwheel is nice and quick) and having a mac I knew it'd work well.

Mine loves Chevelle

[Private.Tucker]

...well, used to. Then I made a different playlist and labeled it as "Upbeat" music. Now It loves Motion City Soundtrack. Now, I like all the music I have on my iPod (duh) but its very noticeable when I hear the same song 3 times in one hour 30 minutes worth of driving. I can tell you that over the last 2 days (4 hours of driving) I have heard Foo Fighters' "Enough Space" 6 times out of 231 songs. Does the iPod sense higher played songs/albums/groups or is its randomness just that awful? 2GB Nano 1g

Truly Random

[sriramv_iyer]

I agree that it is extremly difficlut to be truly random. There are some good ways of initializing the seed in such a way that the pseudo random number generator behaves differently. A good way, done in telecom terminals is to measure the noise at the receiver and then use it to seed the random number generator. Since, the noise is truly random, that is a good way to seed the random number generator. If the costs, are not too high, then it might even be a good idea to read noise (or any truly random parameter) whenever required. That would be close to really random, provided, we can map the random parameter into a quantitative parameter without big errors and approximations.

SmartShuffle

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

The open-source music player I wrote (BSoftPlayer) has a feature called "SmartShuffle". One of the biggest problems with shuffle is that it's difficult to understand when the tracks will change order, and it's difficult to know wheter or not a track is going to be played more than once in a single "cycle". Some shuffle features will play the same track twice before playing through your entire library, and some won't.

With SmartShuffle, the order is randomized, but it remains the same until you "reshuffle".

Sorry buddy, i disagree

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

I think (and have... thunk?) that "randomness" on the ipod is actually a secret R&D weapon in the apple ipod toolkit. From a psychological standpoint alone, what is the value of all other mp3 players being truly (read unadjusted psuedo random) and the ipod being a little less.. that is, what if they, say, mark the number of times you don't let a song play through, but skip it in the first 10 seconds? There are powerful means by which they can onboard build a profile and i have three things to say about that:

1) that is a FUN project for a team of engineers to do and,
2) Why wouldn't they for the HUGE hidden psycological impact it could have in differentiating the player
3) It's closed source so you can't actually tell, so the five songs with-no-user-input model wouldn't work. Another might...

Regardless, i wouldn't expect them to miss the importance such a feature would have. The iPod just keeps the vibe going, while the competition keeps playing country-house-ambient-country-house-ambient

Also, the "sound-check" would be a good place to do some quick BPM detection to have like tempo's play. The new settings for more- or less-random in iTunes almost scream "we are doing something tricky"

Wouldn't you, if you could?

What you should expect...

[YGingras]

A long time ago I was dissatisfied by the lack of random in XMMS so I jumped to the source to see what I could do. I think this was my first contribution to a free software project. Anyway, here is what I found: XMMS keeps two copies of the playlist, one that is in the order you set and one that is "shuffled". This has to be clear, all the tracks in the play list are there exactly once in the shuffled playlist.

I can't recall when the shuffled playlist was reshuffled but in was not that often, maybe only when you added or removed tracks. So if you like Smoke on Water but that Ballroom Blitz is just two song after that, too bad, you'll always get Ballroom Blitz soon after you double click on Smoke on Water. Technically speaking, the shuffling was perfect, the random generator was properly seeded and they divided in the right way to prevent loosing entropy. The lack of reshuffling was entirely responsible to the perceived lack of randomness.

So my patch was just that: trigger reshuffling a lot more often. As far as I know this patch was never merged but my copy of XMMS did have the proper random behavior. I don't know if it's the same problem with the iPod. That's something I like with free software: you can fix it!

iPod metadata

[Meph_the_Balrog]

Does the iPod sense higher played songs/albums/groups

Actually it does. There's a counter for the number of times a song has been played through completely. I believe one of the in-built playlists accesses this metadata.

Mind you, as to wether the device uses this information to weight its shuffle function is something I have no idea about.

Re:OCD

[timeOday]

As if any of this were relevant to music listening.

The simple truth is that the shuffle was an extremely lame product that was only created so Apple could cover the entire price range of mp3 players. Nobody else had the gall to sell a player with no display. "An experience in aural spontaneity..." pardon me while I barf. It was a simple matter of designing to a price. I won't question Apple on it because they've made more money from the iPod than I ever would have imagined. The folks who bought a Shuffle, on the other hand, I have to wonder about.

Dupe Tag

[sr180]

And the question remains, why doesnt the DUPE tag work anymore? I liked that tag. Seeing it meant I could avoid the 500 "OMG! Its a Dupe!11!" comments.

Re:Bias

[NeMon'ess]

Never-the-less, letting power-users control the randomness would be a nice feature. Say I have ten songs from an artist. When I make a playlist of a thousand songs, and the aforementioned ten all get played within the first three-hundred, that's not desirable to me. That means in the last 700 songs I'm not going to hear that artist, and that could mean weeks or months of playtime.

Apple does include an option for the minimum number of songs before playing an artist again, but that doesn't necessarily fix the problem. The songs should be spread out. I'm okay with two of the same artist back-to-back as long as they're not all played too close together or worse, overplayed.

Just because randomly an artist may temporarily get played more often isn't a good way of doing things.

Additionally, iTunes and other programs don't give an option to weight the play-order based on how long it's been since a song played. If I just heard a song last week, the program should play another by that artist that I haven't heard in three months. Now I don't mean it should always play the oldest-played song first, otherwise they'd be stuck in a loop. But weight the order towards older-played.

Finally, iTunes doesn't make a note in its database if I've skipped a song before it finished or early on. How many times have users skipped a song because he or she wasn't in the mood for it, or heard it too recently? It would be better if iTunes tracked both last-played, and last-attempted-played. So when it makes a playlist, it puts songs I haven't heard for a while in early, and songs it recently attempted-to-play in later.

Just because what I'm asking for is 10+ times more computationally costly than what iTunes and iPods currently do doesn't mean it's hard. CPUs are more than powerful enough to do this in the background while playing songs.

Re:Bias

[NeMon'ess]

Right. I want a controllable Shuffled mode to mix up the order. I don't want true Random play. I think that's what a lot of people want. Perhaps even a majority.

I don't even necessarily want 1 of those 10 songs played every 100. Last year I made a multi-thousand-song playlist in iTunes. After shuffling it and listening mostly through, I was noticing when tracks by Wolfstone played. I went back and realized that about 80% of those tracks had played in the first half of the playlist. Because the last 20% were spaced so far apart in the second half, and playing so rarely, it was catching my ear.

So I ended up wishing the distribution had been more even. Not exactly 50-50 even, but 80-20 was too skewed. More like 65-35 would probably be enough. And of course the songs I hadn't listened-through in a long time should have been weighted to play sooner in the list than the more recently heard ones.

Like Scientoloigists extinguishing streetlights!

[Ancient_Hacker]

It's a psychological thing. Like walking by a streetlight and having it go on or off. If it happens again within an hour or so, you're SURE it had something to do with you. Even if it's the same streetlight. Even if you know when the bulbs get old, they overheat and cycle on and off. Every week or so I hear two Bob Dylan tunes back to back on my iPod. Not too surprising, I only have about 60 tunes on there and Senor Zimmerman "sings" four of them.

Re:Feature Request

[NeMon'ess]

Almost two years ago. [slashdot.org]

Then they changed their form so they no longer accept feature requests for iTunes, only iPods. As for my request, iTunes 6 doesn't remember where I was in a playlist after closing the program, does version 7?

It only took Apple three or four years to incrementally improve their Shuffle feature. I'm sure I just need to wait another year or two for my request to get implemented.

Maybe in another two or three years enough people will have asked Steve Jobs to get the Shuffle feature to play songs sooner that haven't played in a while. Now that version 7 (are the bugs fixed yet?) notes when a track was skipped, maybe version 8 will actually do this.