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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?

#81

Post by kstenerud »

craftinator wrote: post #76
kstenerud wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% of people mean this: I don't want to hear the same song too soon after hearing it before. How soon is "too soon"? Probably anywhere from 50 to 200 songs. Easiest solution that gets you 99% there would be to make a shuffled list, run through the whole thing, then shuffle again. The only reason why this wasn't done in the past was lack of RAM, which isn't an issue anymore. Or if RAM really actually is an issue on y…

Lack of RAM? Make an array of pointers or ints or whatever corresponding to the current order of songs, then lookup each new song as the current song ends. Maybe 1kB RAM...

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 buffer to the mp3 chip, etc, etc.

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

#82

Post by [deleted] »

craftinator wrote: post #76
kstenerud wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% of people mean this: I don't want to hear the same song too soon after hearing it before. How soon is "too soon"? Probably anywhere from 50 to 200 songs. Easiest solution that gets you 99% there would be to make a shuffled list, run through the whole thing, then shuffle again. The only reason why this wasn't done in the past was lack of RAM, which isn't an issue anymore. Or if RAM really actually is an issue on y…

Lack of RAM? Make an array of pointers or ints or whatever corresponding to the current order of songs, then lookup each new song as the current song ends. Maybe 1kB RAM...

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by WorldMaker »

wonderhamster wrote: post #54

what kind of animal listens to music in a random order?!? I have trouble finding a player that organizes by album. I just want to play to a sorted list of albums in order. No player does this.

You can set that up with Foobar 2000 if your albums are correctly tagged. It's also one of the few players I've met that gives you a "middle choice" of randomly picking albums, but playing the albums themselves start to finish.

(That said, I'm one of the animals that shuffles everything in my library regardless of genre or album order anything else.)

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

#86

Post by Timpy »

saghm wrote: 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…

Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road, and We Will Rock You / We Are the Champions are my go to examples for this. I hate going for a run and getting the penultimate track from Dark Side of the Moon on shuffle. It cuts out right at the climax, I always stop my run and manually tell Google to play Eclipse next.

While I'm on my soapbox, another tremendous annoyance I want to get rid of: "Deluxe" tracks. I'm so tired of scrolling through re-released/deluxe versions of albums to find the album with the original track listing. I don't want remixes or rough cuts in my random playlist. With all of the shallow marketing attempts at selling the same classic albums to the general public over and over again, the alternate tracks outnumber the original.

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

#87

Post by WorldMaker »

There's definitely a feeling that track orders feel quite similar between play attempts because there isn't a large enough "shuffle memory" between sessions, or in many of these services any "shuffle memory" at all (some really are just random and hoping the distribution of the random function enough to compensate).

5 Disk Changers had a finite need for memory for recalling what had been played, which was easy enough. Some people's libraries are so large it's an interesting question of how much is it worth storing the played state of a song, and for how long (can you clear that to start a fresh shuffle? can you add individual songs back without just clearing the memory state?).

Some players let you manually manage this: shuffle songs into a shuffle playlist and then play that list in track order, remembering your last heard state.

(For the purposes of dealing with the bad PRNG in my car I wrote a Python script a few years ago to do a version of that shuffle playlist management in how it fills thumb drives intended for my car. It keeps a shuffled track list in YAML and then uses that copy files to the drive by track number for the simple lexicographic default play order of the car.)

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

#88

Post by BoiledCabbage »

kstenerud wrote: post #81
craftinator wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of RAM? Make an array of pointers or ints or whatever corresponding to the current order of songs, then lookup each new song as the current song ends. Maybe 1kB RAM...

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.

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

#89

Post by [deleted] »

saghm wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#90

Post by ilikehurdles »

kstenerud wrote: post #75
ilikehurdles wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for that claim? For me, random means: "I want to hear every song in this selection exactly once, chosen randomly". Random should mean uniformly distributed and I don't care whether the same artist or album is played back-to-back. I feel like this is exactly what "shuffle" has meant for decades before some UX quack at Spotify headquarters decided they knew better.

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.
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