Random factor, like a tractor, weave your merry way.

[Jota180]

So you're sitting there one evening and don't know what music you want to play and so, stick your streamer on random. Sometimes it doesn't feel very random, for a good reason - our brains are jumping to the wrong conclusions....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31302312

Random, it's the one thing that bugged me most about the Naim UnitiQute2 because, using Naims own app, the player pulls 500 songs from your NAS. Not 499, not 501. Just 500. It's a hardware issue, the memory can only take x amount apparently. And it pulls a good few from one album, then a good few from another album. Delete that random playlist and click random again and what do you get? Pretty much the same selection. Someone pointed me in the direction of BubbleUPnP and as that app pushes the music from the NAS to the player you can random play your entire collection.

I 'discover' quite a lot of new songs that way from my collection. Any other random factor tractors out there?

Bonus points for the first person to say where the post title comes from!

 

[Vladimir]

Ha! Cool article, thanks for sharing.

 

[SteveR750]

Aah, the good old theory of inevitability. I read somewhere about Spotify's shiffle algorithm, what messes it up is if you have multiples of the same song in a playlist...d'oh!

 

[The_Lhc]

Shooting Stars obviously.

Shocked that a Uniti can only load 500 songs for a shuffle, Sonos can queue up the entire library and shuffle it on the fly (ie, if you hit a song and want to hear the next one on that album, you just turn shuffle off and it'll play in the right order, I haven't found another player, hardware or software that does that, they all seem to shuffle first and then it's impossible to "unshuffle"). I can shuffle up all 8,000 tracks in my library on Sonos no worries.

 

[steve_1979]

Windows Media Player and my Sony MP3 player shuffles all 4000 of my music tracks when playing on random.

 

[The_Lhc]

Windows Media Player and my Sony MP3 player shuffles all 4000 of my music tracks when playing on random.

As you expect but can they unshuffle a selection whilst playing? The example that always springs to mind for me is if a player starts playing The World Is My Oyster by Frankie Goes To Hollywood and you decide you want to let it run into Welcome To The Pleasuredome can you just turn off shuffle and expect it to do that? Sonos does but Poweramp on my phone doesn't because it pre-shuffles the selection, unlike Sonos, which is shuffling on the go and retains the original album ordering (assuming you've added the tracks to the queue using the Album selection, rather than the Track selection, in which case they're in alphabetical trackname order).

Still bonkers that a Uniti can only load up 500 tracks though.

 

[Spookeh]

probably they can unshuffle yes

winamp works like that, it doesnt re-order the list so u can turn off shuffle mid-album