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

On my phone I have a micro SD card with thousands of Mp3s on it yet I catch both Google Play Music and VLC player playing the same progression of music over and over when I have the random button set to on... I thought this was because it was a tactic to get me to upgrade the music players I was using, but it also happens lately on all kinds of devices I use.

YouTube, Spotify, and SoundCloud provide revolutionary services yet it seems like a lot of the time I am listening to pre-arranged and designated music playlists rather than a truly honest music stream.

In the days of the 5 disk CD changer, people truly knew what random meant. no tune was played twice until all of the tunes were played...

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 expect from “shuffle” mode?

It is in fact a random shuffling. Hence the name that was used for this function.

Nitpicking your nitpick, the difference is whether the random sampling is with replacement or without replacement. Wikipedia's definition of "simple random sample" defines it to include both ways:

[S]ampling is typically done "without replacement", i.e., one deliberately avoids choosing any member of the population more than once. Although simple random sampling can be conducted with replacement instead, this is less common and would normally be described more fully as simple random sampling with replacement.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_random_sample

Seems like a Markov Chain approach--considered over artist and genre--would be a good idea.