Back in the day, Apple had to tweak the shuffle feature on iTunes because truly random wasn't random enough for people. It seems incomprehensible to some that a random playlist would play the same song twice in a row. People should roll a die more often.

[–] Signtist@bookwyr.me 4 points 4 hours ago

I've noticed that randomized Spotify has what I call "rivers" of songs, where once it randomly hits one song along the river, it will always play the next one in the river until it hits the end. It's really annoying.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 26 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

It was doing a random selection when people expected a randomly ordered sequence.

[–] BallShapedMan@lemmy.world 9 points 7 hours ago

This is it. What people think random is vs what it really is are often different.

The same song in a row three times is random etc. Randomness includes clumping. But most people think clumping isn't random. We think shuffled is random.

The button isn't even called random anymore. It's called shuffle.

The book Fooled by Randomness is the best book on the phenomenon I've read. Taleb kills it in this book and it might be worth your time if this is interesting to you.

[–] mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 hours ago

Vlc, atleast on android does randomly ordered sequence for music. The list is generated when you shuffle and it also shows how many tracks are remaining and total time for thoose tracks. No track repeats till a full sequence is over and i belive that is the best way of shuffling songs. But still you shoukd be removing thoose specific songs from your pkaylist by yourself

[–] aeronmelon@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

It was only playing the same song twice if people have the same song twice in their library or playlist. The only other possibility with either shuffle software is if you have it on shuffle repeat all, and it just so happens that the last song in the first shuffling is also the first song in the next. This can still happen today, but it is increasingly rare the larger your playlist is.

The issue back then was how it would randomly play the same artist twice in a row, or manage to play songs from an alum sequentially. Truly random shuffling.

Steve Jobs coined the term “less random” because the then-new shuffle would intentionally avoid playing the same artist or songs from the same album twice in a row.

[–] untorquer@quokk.au 1 points 6 hours ago

I think the spotify shuffle+ algorithm weighs songs more when you've liked them more recently.

I'm also fairly confident the artist's contract impacts the weight as well, especially for suggested songs not in your playlist.

Songs from the backlog get played, but at a much lower frequency. Random should have a relatively flat distribution, not a skewed bell curve.