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Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?

#101

Post by gpvos »

jayd16 wrote: post #42
patmcc wrote: post #15

Here's the problem: go ahead and ask a bunch of different people what they want/expect their shuffle/random button to do and you'll get a bunch of different answers. 1. I want it to play in a truly random fashion, with replacement (same song twice in a row is possible). 2. I want it to play in a truly random fashion, without replacement (each song is removed from the list once played). 3. I want it to "seem" random (…

Don't forget that the sufflers will often try to match song outros and intros so they seamlessly cross-fade. This could have the appearance of #4.

Can you name shufflers which actually do this?

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?

#102

Post by kstenerud »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #88
kstenerud wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, lack of RAM. First mp3 player I ever worked on consisted of a PIC driving an IDE hard drive over I/O pins, and an mp3 chip over I2C, with 2k RAM for the whole shebang. If you want to support more than 256 songs, you'll need 2 bytes per index value, so 2k RAM just for the shuffle table if you have 1000 songs. Then there's the hard drive controller, the FS driver and file I/O interface, the LCD driver, the send bu…

Mp3 players have had more than 2k of RAM for way longer than two decades. The hardware restrictions of the earliest IDE HD based MP3 players really have nothing to do with any limitations on modern shuffle ability. IPod in 2001 had 32MB of RAM. 2k RAM is not relevant to this discussion. You getting close to discussing 3 decade old technology.

It's very relevant. The early technological restrictions become the standard practice, which fail to change after the original restrictions no longer apply.

Using random number generators for shuffle mode was a stopgap measure that everyone else cargo culted because it's easier than critical thought.

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?

#104

Post by kstenerud »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #90
kstenerud wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... what you're saying is that you don't want to hear the same song too soon after hearing it before?

No, I’m saying I want to hear every song in the list exactly once before any is repeated. Your summary is more generous than my definition.

So... You'd say that my summary gets you 80% of the way there?

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?

#107

Post by EdwardDiego »

kleer001 wrote: post #59
Fellshard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, "I want 'random' songs that are musically appealing to hear in sequence." A sort of lite DJ logic, really; not necessarily modifying the songs' entrances and exits, but more selecting keys and tempos.

From what I remember, Pandora did that really well. It's been a while since I've used it, but their classification system was really cool.

I was very sad when Pandora left the NZ market. :(

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?

#108

Post by iforgotpassword »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #90
kstenerud wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... what you're saying is that you don't want to hear the same song too soon after hearing it before?

No, I’m saying I want to hear every song in the list exactly once before any is repeated. Your summary is more generous than my definition.

That's shuffle, not random. Maybe randomized. With random, every song should have the same chance of being picked, which would technically allow the same song to play twice. If you'd let the player run for a decade, every song should have played about the same number of times.

But this usually leads to people perceiving the feature as not being random enough.

See Spotify for example: https://www.quora.com/Is-Spotifys-shuffle-feature-truly-rand...

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?

#109

Post by rdiddly »

patmcc wrote: post #15

Here's the problem: go ahead and ask a bunch of different people what they want/expect their shuffle/random button to do and you'll get a bunch of different answers. 1. I want it to play in a truly random fashion, with replacement (same song twice in a row is possible). 2. I want it to play in a truly random fashion, without replacement (each song is removed from the list once played). 3. I want it to "seem" random (…

Take that comment almost verbatim, and turn it into a menu in the options/config area, and you can have my money!

Re: Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?

#110

Post by mkl »

ssivark wrote: post #3

Dunno about contemporary music players, but: > no tune was played twice until all of the tunes were played That is definitely not compatible with actual mathematical “randomness”. Try rolling a die multiple times and see whether you get all six numbers before repeats. It’s very unlikely (probability of all six rolls being unique = 6!/6^6 = 1.5%) Which brings up the interesting question — what do humans actually expec…

Mathematical randomness can describe an enormous range of behaviour, including shuffling. Shuffling is sampling without replacement. Rolling a die repeatedly is sampling with replacement (imagine the numbers 1-6 written on cards and mixed together in a bag; to get a die's behaviour you need to put a card you draw out and look at back again before the next draw).
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