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dist-epochtoday at 10:11 AM3 repliesview on HN

There is the well known problem that "random" shuffling of songs doesn't sound "random" to people and is disliked.

I wonder if the semi-random "universality" pattern they talk about in this article aligns more closely with what people want from song shuffling.


Replies

pegasustoday at 10:38 AM

It's not that a random shuffling of songs doesn't sound random enough, it's that certain reasonable requirements besides randomness don't hold. For example, you'd not want hear the same track twice in a row, even though this is bound to happen in a strictly random shuffling.

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blurbleblurbletoday at 2:15 PM

Thank you for reading and understanding the article

stronglikedantoday at 3:31 PM

Song shuffling has been broken for ages now. It used to work correctly, like shuffling and dealing a deck of cards, only reshuffling and redealing when the entire deck has been dealt (or the user initiates a reshuffle).. Now it's just randomly jumping around a playlist, sometimes playing the same song more than once before all the songs are played once. I have a feeling that money is involved somehow, as with everything else that's been enshittified.