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• iTunes: Just how random is random?

iTunes: Just how random is random?

By David Braue on 08 March 2007

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  Tommii commented on 08/11/2009 23:04 Report abuse

  I had a playlist of 50 songs on shuffle, there was only one song that was in the playlist twice ans surprise-surprise apple's "shuffle" feature played them back to back.

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  Fiiish commented on 03/11/2009 11:18 Report abuse

  I think that the random issue is not just with itunes but with the mac book pro also. I play a game called civilization 4 on a mac book pro running Mac OSX 10.5.8. I partitioned the drive and run a copy of windows to play the game. When the game starts you can choose to play music randomly from a chosen file. I play mine from an external hard drive with a music folder. As long as the game continues the music seems random, but if you reload the game the same same band begins almost every time. For about a year every reload played Jethro Tull, and now its on a jefferson Airplane series. Not only that but if you reload again it plays a different Jefferson Airplane song in the same order on each reload. No randomness there. I have tried shuffeling the order of the songs on the hard drive with no change. If I play the game with the hard drive on any other pc the music is totally random. I even had a friend bring over his hard drive with a similar song list and the mac again went on its Jefferson Airplane kick. Any ideas on how to solve this would be great.

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  Fiiish commented on 03/11/2009 10:37 Report abuse

  I think that the random issue is not just with itunes but with the mac book pro also. I play a game called civilization 4 on a mac book pro running Mac OSX 10.5.8. I partitioned the drive and run a copy of windows to play the game. When the game starts you can choose to play music randomly from a chosen file. I play mine from an external hard drive with a music folder. As long as the game continues the music seems random, but if you reload the game the same same band begins almost every time. For about a year every reload played Jethro Tull, and now its on a jefferson Airplane series. Not only that but if you reload again it plays a different Jefferson Airplane song in the same order on each reload. No randomness there. I have tried shuffeling the order of the songs on the hard drive with no change. If I play the game with the hard drive on any other pc the music is totally random. I even had a friend bring over his hard drive with a similar song list and the mac again went on its Jefferson Airplane kick. Any ideas on how to solve this would be great.

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  cereal commented on 29/10/2009 01:46 Report abuse

  Funkleberry - thank you! Itunes definitely repeats certain songs while skipping others forever. It's particularly noticeable if your mp3's came from albums, like most of mine did. I use iTunes for "random" shuffle almost all the time, that's the main thing it has for me over actually putting on a record on the "stereo." But it clearly is not "random" or even close. I swear I hear"Hang on to Yourself" at least once every couple days, but never any other tracks from Ziggy Stardust - ever.
  
  I have never bought music from Apple or downloaded anything, so I doubt I'm playing many files that have been secretly programmed by Apple to repeat more as per terms of some contract with EMI or whoever. I also don't think Apple is benefitting from me hearing Aphex Twin instead of The Byrds; but perhaps iTunes has a HAL-9000 mentality, and is trying to convert me to techno. Well, it wasn't working, and now thanks to Mr. Funkleberry, I don't have to worry about it.
  
  Half hour into this new "playlist" and I'm hearing songs that have not been played in probably forever. Both bad and good, but at least - clearly more random.
  
  Hartelijke bedankt/merci mille fois/thanks ever so much!

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  Steph commented on 11/10/2009 14:59 Report abuse

  I've noticed this too.
  when ever i randomize my playlists the same artist are played: Taylor Swift, Cobra Starship, Flo-Rida, Kanye West and P!nk. and other artist that are famous right now.
  These artist are all in the itunes 200 right now and my itunes keeps playing their songs.
  So i believe what this article has reserched.

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  Aaron802 commented on 03/10/2009 15:11 Report abuse

  I did an experiment to test randomness with iTunes smart playlists. I created 26 2-second mp3 files and titled them "A", "B", "C",...,"Z" with the same genre "test1". Then I made a Helper playlist: genre="test1" select 15 items by least recently played. Then I made the Main playlist to pick from the Helper playlist and select 15 items at random. My thinking is that when a song plays on the Main playlist, it also falls off the the Helper playlist until 11 more songs have played then it makes it back on the Helper playlist. At which point, the Main playlist has a 1/15 chance of picking that song again to put back in it's lineup. What I found was no randomness at all. After letting the songs all play through, both playlists became exactly alike with the same sequence of songs. The Main playlist picked songs in the exact order they appears in the Helper playlist. Even with manual shuffling and manually playing songs out of order, both list eventually became the same. Please someone tell me my error and why this doesn't work.

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  Emeldi commented on 14/09/2009 01:25 Report abuse

  Keep in mind that a truly random system often doesn't look random or evenly distributed. When a human tries to make something random, they tend to evenly distribute. When a system is truly random, the results only begin to look uniform with huge samples, and tend to appear skewed slightly in smaller samples.
  
  "Scientist" is right, you'd have to run the experiment clean again with the same songs and find out if Lionel still keeps the number one spot or not to see if there really was any weight. If the second set of results closely matches the first then there is a discrepancy, but if new artists climb to the top than it is probably more random than you think.

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  Funkleberry commented on 07/09/2009 08:16 Report abuse

  I guess my point is that I have worked out how to get all my songs on my PC to play without repeating (below).
  
  Also if I set the limit at 50 items it does not repeat any artists but it does play the playlist in whichever sort order you select ie Artist, size or whatever. So my mission is accomplished. I'll leave it to you statistical types to argue about the degree of randomness. My requirement was to shuffle all of my songs and play through all of them once without repeating... I wanted this over truly statistical randomness. (Btw I read hat the world record for red's coming up consecutively on a roulete wheel was 28 . . . and you certainly wouldn't want that principle to work on your iPod. :-)

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  scientist commented on 06/09/2009 23:16 Report abuse

  very nice blog, thanks. However, there is a major statistical problem with your approach, and that would be that you would have to repeat the experiment fro scratch a couple of times. if then the results were identical (i.e. very similar) we could assume something from it...
  
  with what we have now we cannot make any statement because we cannot exclude pure randomness nor that their is a glitch in the itunes program that causes this seemingly non-random distribution.
  
  if, let's say, the same songs were to appear in your top ten list repeatedly (with the whole process: new computer, fresh downloaded songs, freshly ripped cd's etc) one could conclude that there must be info to the songs that we are unaware of that itunes uses in the construction of the playlists. until then we may as well postulate that a computer simply cannot produce real random lists...
  
  i am afraid, more we cannot conclude at this stage. so please go ahead and repeat this experiment a couple of times...then we will see...

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  Funkleberry commented on 06/09/2009 12:29 Report abuse

  I think I have solved my immediate is using itunes 8. This involves setting up a new smart playlist and selecting the Playcount is 0.
  
  Then limit the number of items to a reasonable number selected by random and check the Live Updating box . . .
  
  What this does is that each time a song finishes playing, it drops off th eplay list and brings in another one. This is on my PC. When I play the playlist on the ipod, I suspect that the songs will remain in the playlist until the next synchronisation.
  
  This gives me some confidence that I can get through all of my songs before I pass away in a few years time.
  
  Once all of the songs have played you can either reset the count to 0 or modify the select rule to your taste. I hope that helps a bit.