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How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

engineering.atspotify.com

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Re: How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

#41

Post by Bewelge »

kubanczyk wrote: post #31
Bewelge wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had the (conspiracy) theory for a while that this is by design. Kept happening to me on an account where I've disabled watch-history. Now I'm watching on an account where it's enabled and it hasn't happened even once. And it's been months since I switched. Actually not sure if it's even that far fetched. Making the logged-out-experience worse on purpose is something all the big internet firms do.

But... You've asked YT not to remember the previous videos, and it doesn't: LGTM. There could be advanced implementations (like with the remembered passwords, where YT would store a list of seeded hashes of your viewed videos). But they are that: advanced implementations, that impose an extra cost.

Yea I guess you're right that in this case it probably boils down to extra cost.

Though I still think "not remembering watch history" (and adjusting what you are shown based on that) to mean that a functionality that doesn't have anything to do with tracking (because it only requires information from your current session) to be a little lazy.

You wouldn't expect a slide-show of images to be shown in random order, just because you didn't consent to the cookie banner.

But in all fairness - I really like youtube's auto-play and suggestion algorithm when it comes to music. I use it for free and I haven't seen an ad in years so I don't want to complain :)

Re: How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

#42

Post by Bewelge »

Akronymus wrote: post #32
Bewelge wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had the (conspiracy) theory for a while that this is by design. Kept happening to me on an account where I've disabled watch-history. Now I'm watching on an account where it's enabled and it hasn't happened even once. And it's been months since I switched. Actually not sure if it's even that far fetched. Making the logged-out-experience worse on purpose is something all the big internet firms do.

I have watch history enabled and still get the loops all the time. I even went so far to seek out a website that does it for me, and which I set up as a bookmark https://youtube-playlist-randomizer.bitbucket.io/ Altough, seems like the site is now broken

That's interesting.

I used to get it all the time and haven't experienced it since switching to an account where it's enabled. I guess it may have just been a coincidence.

Re: How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

#43

Post by TheJuli »

This is simply is not true. Their "random" algorithm prefers cached songs on the device by quite a margin. I have playlists with more than 500-600 songs in them and can account for it first hand, since I know the songs in the playlist and some seem to never show up.

Do not believe me? Simply clean spotify's cache and look closely at somehow magically new songs start popping up in the shuffle!

Re: How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

#44

Post by qsort »

PetitPrince wrote: post #37
xjay wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rob Pardo (Blizzard, World of Warcraft (2004)) said they decided to model randomness after how players thought it worked. > ..at least once a week, a developer would come to my office, and say "the random number generator is broken, we need to look at it."--It's because they hit a streak. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhC0NaB6ock&t=2343s He shares more details about game design choices in the video.

Video games are rife with randomness manipulation. - X-Com 2 lies in favor of the playing when displaying a chance of hitting of 85% [ https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/jake-solomon-explains-t... ] - Baldur's Gate 3 "Karmic Dice" will prevent streaks of very high or lows rolls - Tetris games doesn't use Math.random for piece distribution. Most modern Tetris (like Tetris Effect) uses Fischer-Yates with 7 pieces (in…

I don't know if that's still the case (haven't played in more than three years), but Magic the Gathering Arena (digital version of the collectible card game) used to rig the opening hands to make them "more average".

This had consequences on competitive play; they wouldn't even tell you how exactly the algorithm worked, so the only way to build a deck was lots and lots of simulations.

Re: How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

#45

Post by hasbot »

I implemented this a bunch of years ago in a fork of a SubSonic client. Their explanation wasn't sufficient to implement the algorithm but I did figure it out. I did like it. I stopped using SubSonic and now just use the simplistic shuffle in my media player. It's weird that I'm slightly annoyed when two songs from the same artist are played in proximity.

Re: How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

#46

Post by mihaic »

Honestly, I really dislike that I can't get Spotify to actually randomize my playlist. I actually want to rediscover some old song that I liked, but it keeps giving me the most recent songs way too much.

I understand that you need to make something that the average user perceives as random, but please give me some control in the advanced settings, it's literally one of the few things I want to control.

Re: How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

#47

Post by Kuinox »

Spotify random isn't well distributed at all, I always listen to my playlist in random mode and I almost never get a good chunks of tracks. Using something like last.fm I can clearly see some tracks get hundred of play, while some never get a single one.

Re: How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

#48

Post by paulcole »

rob74 wrote: post #24
croisillon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you're not on the paid plan you have ads every now and then, right? how is that not more annoying than the non working shuffle?

Well, if you are using the web version, there are ad blockers (e.g. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/spotify-ad-blocker-... )... Actually, if you're familiar with web tech, it's not that hard to write your own ad blocker, then you're not dependent on the extension provider updating it when Spotify changes the names of the HTML elements again . But I'm confident they are already working on a WASM/canvas-based…

[flagged]

Re: How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

#49

Post by javier_e06 »

I took statistics in college and I was a bad at it. So, the coin-lunch reference in the article would have make me raise my hand and ask: Would not be the case that if a coin toss gives me eagle 1k times in a row, there is something wrong with the coin toss? I know the chance if 50/50. The only way to prove it is by testing it. If a casino has now winners for one year and the regulators say that their tables are legit, well, something is rotten in Denmark.

Re: How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

#50

Post by helsinkiandrew »

I used to have a Turtle Beach AudioTron [1] (hardware device to store and play audio files to HIFI amp). Device was terrific (for its time) but the shuffle/random play was slightly off - occasionally you'd get deja vu whilst listening to an artist on shuffle - that completely spoilt the device for me, rather than listening to the music I was listening for the next repeat/pattern.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AudioTron

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