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

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41–50 of 152 posts

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

#41

> no tune was played twice until all of the tunes were played... That doesn't sound random. I use Google Play Music and it "randomizes" things in the way you desire. It takes your playlist and shuffles the entries; you can even press a button to see how it's sorted it. That ordering sticks around forever if you take no further action, though, so it will repeat that random ordering indefinitely unless you press the sh…

If its programmed like youtube, it only shuffles the last 100 you have visited in your list, not the whole list.

Not sure exactly what you're referring to here, but on Google Play Music, there's a concept of a "queue" of music that's currently playing/has been played. Generally it's just the songs in order of the album/playlist/etc. where you selected the song to play, but you can also manually add/delete/reorder the songs on the list. Since it keeps track of the songs that were played previously in the queue (to enable the "previous track" button, among other things), enabling shuffle just reorders the queue in a random way (with the currently playing song first). From the few times when I've used it with extremely large lists of songs (e.g. my entire music library), it doesn't just shuffle a subset of the queue that you have currently active, but the entire thing. You can also choose to start playing an album/playlist/etc. shuffled, which just puts the entire thing in the queue in a random order and starts playing through it.

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

#42
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.

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

#43
I don't have a problem playing my local ogg/mp3 collection in shuffle mode with XMMS; but using Youtube for listening to music sucks in a related regard.

It seems like pretty much no matter what song I start listening to on YT, it eventually falls into a rut where I start hearing the same handful of songs that I've heard a million times. It's like it's too good at figuring out "what I like" and tries to only play songs it "knows" I like. Or more likely, since plenty of what I like are "deep cuts", it's just playing the most popular few songs by the given artist(s).

The order within a given session is probably shuffled up OK, but it still sucks from a variety standpoint because I don't want to hear "Eighteen and Life", "Round and Round", "Kickstart My Heart", "Livin' On A Prayer", "Rock You Like A Hurricane", "Fallen Angel", "Shot In The Dark", etc., day after day after day after day after day... as much as I like all of those songs.

It does seem to be at least somewhat genre aware though. If I start out listening to classical music, it doesn't jump to metal/rock, or if I start out listening to synthwave, it doesn't bridge to classical. But the problem I just described seems to exist within each genre. :-(

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

#44
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 (…

Smart playlists in iTunes were great for solving 5 and 6 with separate auto-updated playlists, but sadly Spotify has no interest in this problem.

I hate the trend from product managers of responding to "wow there's a lot of things people might be intending here" with "let's just pick one in the name of simplicity." Give me the hooks to let me make my own solutions for the other possibilities!

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

#45
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 (…

What I want is to have the options laid out before be so I can pick which one I want. Spotify and friends seem to go with a "fuck you, we know what you want better than you do" approach, which is one of many reasons I prefer to own my music instead of streaming it.

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

#46

Seems to me like a perfect opportunity for a simple neural network or machine learning model to predict the next song to play based on the last k songs having been trained on a bunch of existing playlists.

a NN is overkill for something like this. you don't even complex logic to make a good shuffled mix.

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

#47
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 (…

I want #2 but most players do not do this. Both Amazon Music and Google Play fail although Amazon does a better job at giving me #2. Sometimes it will give me a different random order but sometimes it gives me the same order as it did last time I asked it to shuffle the playlist. To get it to resent the random shuffle I have to manually close down Amazon Music and restart it. Then it resets the shuffle.

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

#48
Google Play Music seems to truly understand shuffle. Everytime you press shuffle button, you can see the playlist change randomly. I think it is very straight forward, randomize without repetition, still many streaming apps fail to implement it - add Saavn, Gaana to the list too.

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

#49
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 (…

Um, no? I would argue most people would say they want 1 or 2, and the rest of those are mostly things that developers convince themselves are adequate substitutes for these things.

We made a music system for the office I worked at a few years back; all of these options came up as possible meanings of "random". We ended up with a system where people could vote on which random they wanted, and all of them got used over the course of a few months. 3 and 4 were very popular.

It also sparked a lively debate about whether people actually wanted what they said they wanted or were just being difficult.

People are weird and English is imprecise.

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

#50
post #30

A bit tangential, but for a while I've wanted the ability to "pin" certain songs together for the purpose of random shuffles so that they always get played back to back. One good example of this is the second half Abbey Road; if I'm shuffling some Beatles songs, I really want "Carry That Weight" to come immediately after "Golden Slumbers" (and if I'm being honest, I want "The End" coming right after both of those). I…

I have noticed that Apple Music seems to always play “we are the champions” after “we will rock you” despite them being different tracks. Not sure how that works!
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