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

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

#31

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

dilutedh2o wrote: post #2

Am just here to nitpick, but the 5 disk CD changer behavior that you just described is not true randomness (by definition).

Which is why it was called "shuffle" and not "random".

Shuffle (mostly) used to do what you expected when you had a medium like CD with a small number of tracks.

As the number of available tracks grew, the definition became less and less obvious.

With a service like Spotify, you could design an entire multi-page specification to cover all the different possible "shuffle" options you could give users - all of which would be useful in at least some settings.

Instead of which users get one button and some guessing.

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

#32

Post by scottlegrand2 » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

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.

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

#33

Post by nickthegreek » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

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 (…

#2 seems like it should be the default but I feel I normally get #4.

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

#34

Post by fevangelou » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

Spotify (and I assume others) doesn't exactly serve a random playlist, but one that favours/returns more revenue back to them. So older releases, "burned out" songs and so on. Create a playlist with 10 songs, add 8 before the 90s (e.g. Cure, U2 etc.) and add some newer ones (after 2000 - e.g. Radiohead). You'll be living in the 80s for most of the time...

If you search the Spotify forums, there are a few posts on the issue with no official answer from Spotify whatsoever.

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

#35

Post by rasjani » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

chkaloon wrote: post #28

Pandora (even though I gave it up for Spotify years ago) seemed to be the best at keeping variety. Spotify is very bad at it.

Never used pandora but MixRadio was the best for my taste. Spotify is nice but it’s really fucking hard to find new stuff that within Spotify itself.

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

#36

Post by crb » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

Steve Jobs in 2005: "You know we've gotten a lot of people that say our shuffle's not random. Well it really is random but sometimes random means you've got two songs from the same artist next to each other. Just happens randomly sometimes.

And so what we've added is smart shuffle to actually make it less random - if you want.

Even though people will think it's more random it's actually less random and what it is, in preferences, there it is right there, it says smart shuffle allows you to control how likely you are to hear multiple songs by the same artist or from the same album in a row."

https://youtu.be/lg188Ebas9E?t=719

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

#37

Post by Fellshard » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

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 (…

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.

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

#38

Post by pwinnski » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

This is why Apple calls it "shuffle" rather than "random."

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

#39

Post by ghostly_s » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

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 (…

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.

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

#40

Post by christiansakai » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

Funny, when I was looking for my first part time dev job in college, a company interviewed me on “how to create a random playlist”. Didn’t get the job.

To this day I still wasn’t sure what was the purpose of that question? Was it to see how I think or did they really wanted me to come up with a way to create random playlist that satisfies their arbitrary definition of random