Is random play truly random?

[Dos_Box]

Nice article from the BBC about this subject: BBC News - How random is random on your music player?

I still think my cars MP3 shuffle system isn't very good though!

[ChickenDhansak]

Interesting. There's a useful section on this website https://www.random.org/ about randomness (scroll down to 'Learn about randomness')

[unixman_again]

The random function on my last mp3 player, always played the same 8 or 9 songs from the several hundred on there. I suspect if I changed the track names from artist_name-song_title.mp3 so something shorter, like 1.mp3, 2.mp3, etc it would have been more random. My new one, doesn't have a random function, but can play tracks inside folders, which the last one couldn't do, hence my naming convention.

[7UD9]

I read something a few years ago about the Random/Shuffle feature in iTunes and how it was truly random, Apple edited it because many people were complaining the same songs kept coming up again and again. They edited it to be (mathematically) less random so that more different songs were played.

 

I can't find any articles about it at the moment

[Dos_Box]

The random function on my last mp3 player, always played the same 8 or 9 songs from the several hundred on there. I suspect if I changed the track names from artist_name-song_title.mp3 so something shorter, like 1.mp3, 2.mp3, etc it would have been more random. My new one, doesn't have a random function, but can play tracks inside folders, which the last one couldn't do, hence my naming convention.

 

Interesting. My car radio reads MP3's via a micro USB drive (SanDisk Cruzer Fit 16GB USB 2.0 Pen Drive SDCZ33-016G-B35 - Scan.co.uk) which contains many hundreds of tracks both in the root of the drive and in folders. Both of which should be fine according to the instructions.

But come switch on time it is always the same tracks getting played. When you add new tracks it sometimes takes days to get these included in the shuffle process.

I think you may have hit on something about the number/naming scheme having some influance on the tracks selected depending on the type of randomiser used.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Dos_Box

[Andrew_C]

I can see that mine runs some sort of sort based on all the names. If I re-start the machine, it plays the tracks in the same order. If I delete a few, whether or not they are in the early part of the queue, the whole order shuffles.

[DavePa]

I listen to the radio - truly random!

 

(Actually not of course - depending on the station they only play a couple of dozen songs from a single genre. Don't recall hearing any classical music on radio 1 for example)

[unixman_again]

You need Absolute Radio with the no repeat guarantee, unless, of course, you don't like what they play. All you need for listening while in the car is a really long cat5 cable

[TomHD]

Apple did rework their Shuffle to be less mathematically random. Maybe this Vsauce YT on "What is Random?" helps this topic?

[LeMarchand]

My car stereo does a fairly good job of randomizing the list. Unfortunately it starts the same random playlist, from the same start point, every time I turn it on! I use a renamer to randomly number the 600+ tracks and now just play 001 Whatever, 002 Another Track, 003 Yet Another Track... and then reorder the list when I start to recognize the order or when I add/delete tracks, whichever comes first.

[Andrew_C]

The other option is to dump all the tracks in one folder and play them alphabetically. Works quite well.

[elsiegee40]

The other option is to dump all the tracks in one folder and play them alphabetically. Works quite well.

 

I've done that before now. It's quite entertaining trying to work out what the title is sometimes!

[JRowley]

The biggest problem with Random in terms of technology is that actually it isn't random at all. Almost all algorithms use a seed value to generate a random number which is then applied to a data set. So you can generate the same random number over and over if you use the same seed value. Also generally speaking random number generators are designed to have an even distribution when you generate millions of numbers, but at low quantities you may get the same number one after the other or clumps of numbers which are close to each other.

 

In programming terms you can do things like use a random number generator (based on cpu cycle count, or similar) to generate a seed for another random number generator, and repeat this process each time you want a new number as this would help mix up the values a fair bit, but beyond that there's not alot can be done. You can also do things like use something which is difficult to predict, such as the amount of solar radiation in our atmosphere as a seed, but you are still reliant on an algorithm.

[TomHD]

Random.org uses atmospheric noise but still, given enough accuracy, can be predicted.

[SteveBentley]

I read somewhere that Deal or No Deal originally used Excel's random function to allocate the amounts of money into the boxes. Somebody spotted that there was a pattern emerging whereby after a proportion of the boxes were revealed you could predict what was in the rest, because Excel is pseudo-random, not random.