Have you ever noticed that the Shuffle option on iTunes or on your iPod isn’t truly random? For example, if you have a playlist with ten tracks and start off by playing, say, the second track, iTunes will always shuffle to the exact same next track, everytime.
Doesn’t seem much like “Shuffling,” does it? It is, though: Apple’s just thinking about Shuffling a different way than you are.
In an interesting thread over at Ask Different, Apple’s philosophy towards Shuffling is explained pretty well.
Here’s how it works: when you first select the “Shuffle” button in iTunes, iTunes immediately creates a randomly generated Shuffle order for your entire library. Apple will then keep this Shuffle order forever, which has the benefit of allowing the “skip to next song” and “skip to previous song” buttons to work the way they should without skipping instead to an entirely different random song.
In this manner, listeners can skip back and forward through a random playlist consistently. Unfortunately, it also results in pretty obvious patterns. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to tell iTunes to generate a new random Shuffle order: just tick the Shuffle button off, then on again.
Source: Stack Exchange
Via: Lifehacker
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
5 responses to “Why iTunes’ Shuffling Order Isn’t Really Random”
I think I figured this out quite a while ago. I love the way iTunes/iPod/iPhone handles the shuffle mode.
This always happens to me in my car: I’m listening to a CD on shuffle mode and skip around the tracks. I come across a great one I want to listen to – but I accidentally skip it – and when I want to get back I just can’t because it brings up a total random song instead of the previous one. This is so annoying!
Just out of curiosity, is there a reason that iTunes could not just cache the songs played and randomly determine the next track each time? It seems feasible to use constant variables like date and time as the seed for the random number gen. I’m probably missing something but that seems like it would allow to skip back to the previous song and provide a better shuffle. Might be too memory intensive though…
Computers can’t generate truly random numbers, anyway.
I hate the shuffle on itunes. Plays the same 30 songs over. http://freeitunesredeemcodes.com/
Generating a shuffle list… wouldn’t that mean that the “random” (or shuffle) playlist is the same, every single time? If so, how random is that? Doesn’t seem random at all to me…