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Comment by dist-epoch | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Random shuffling of songs usually refers to a randomized ordering of a given set of songs, so the same song can’t occur twice in a row if the set only contains unique items. People don’t usually mean an independent random selection from the set each time.

If the list of songs is random shuffled, you can only hear the same song twice if there is a duplicate or if you've cycled through the whole list. That's why you shuffle lists instead of randomly selecting list elements.

>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.

Why would it be? A random shuffling of a unique set remains a unique set.

It's only when "next song is picked at random each time from set" which you're bound to hear the same song twice, but that's not a random playlist shuffling (shuffling implies the new set is created at once).

Or when the set repeats, and the random order puts songs from the end of the first ordering of the set into the beginning of the second ordering of the set, so you quickly hear them twice.

a new ordering, not a new set

Same difference...

(yes, you're technically correct)

You could think of it as wanting your desire to hear the song again build up to a sufficient level to make it worth a relisten, sort of how a bus driver might want potential passengers to accumulate at a bus stop before picking them up, and therefore delay arrival. Very plausible to me that a good music randomization would have similar statistics if you phrase it right.

Thank you for reading and understanding the article

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.

Yeah I suspected something to do with CDN cost efficiency.

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