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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?

#141

Post by ngomez »

hadrien01 wrote: post #70
fevangelou wrote: post #34

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…

One way to mitigate that is to play music in alphabetical order, it's more random than "random" and you can listen to artists you wouldn't ear with the "random" order

This doesn't work too well if someone adds Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV or Kendrick Lamar's untitled unmastered to their playlist.

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

#142

Post by saghm »

Timpy wrote: post #86
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 scr…

That's a great example! I also can't listen to Brain Damage without want to hear Eclipse after.

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

#143

Post by Franciscouzo »

kstenerud wrote: post #64
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 (…

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…

So a permutation? There's no need to store the whole shuffled array in RAM, a big 64-bit co-prime number is enough, you don't care about cryptographically secure numbers, so even 32 bits could work.

For example for a 1000 songs playlist, you choose n to be 2416648531, start with i = 0, you then get the following permutation: 0, 531, 62, 593, 124, 655, 186, 717, 248.

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

#145

Post by eridius »

mrweasel wrote: post #61
crb wrote: post #36

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…

I always got the feeling that the original iPod Shuffle would randomize your songs ONCE, and that's why people where complaining. So when you loaded up your Shuffle, the software would order the songs randomly, on a playlist, for that set of songs. The Shuffle would then reshuffle the songs, when new one where added or removed, but only then. That theory also explained the disconnect between the complaints and Apples…

Apple's response above was talking about iTunes, not about iPods.

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

#146

Post by tsukikage »

majormajor wrote: post #44
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 (…

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!

To be fair, Spotify do in fact give you the hooks: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/

You can have a script sitting on your machine remotely controlling an internet connected player somewhere else.

e.g. here's one I wrote that makes Spotify not play the same track too often: https://github.com/sl236/spotify-deduplicator

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

#147

Post by edanm »

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…

I haven't used it much in a while, but doesn't iTunes have the option of grouping songs together in some way? Basically exactly what you're asking for?

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

#148

Post by Haga »

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 (…

Exactly random, the first one. Everything else is not random. I guess you're answer provides a indirect answer. We devs like to think up algos, which the users do not want. So these algos get shoved beneath the "I feel lucky" button hoping that nobody notices that his her shuffle was replaced with something beta.

TL, dr: Bad product management, that didn't stop coders from featurecreeping

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

#149

Post by ryanmercer »

I like how I have it on random, then it'll play 3-4 titles from one artist in a row, even though that artist is roughly equal in number as any other artist in my library. This will happen at least once a week driving home. It will also barely ever play probably 30% of my titles but it will play 5-10% of them a LOT.

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

#150

Post by adwww »

Buttons840 wrote: post #74
crb wrote: post #36

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…

If I remember correctly, the encryption performed by the Enigma machine was cracked largely because they would never repeat the same character twice in a 3 letter key. The Allies discovered this and it was a big help in their code breaking efforts. My point being, even mathematicians might mistakenly believe that repeating a song or artist is less random. The creators of the Enigma machine were not dumb, but they bel…

I thought the weakness was that a character was never replaced by itself? Eg. HH (for Heil Hitler) could never be replaced with HH, no matter what the seed.
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