Re: MP3 Player Shufflin' Along

Scour Old Cereal Bowls (scouroldcerealbowls@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
) wrote:

> Does anyone know how the shuffle function on car stereos work?  My
> car stereo takes Mp3 CDs.  I have a CD with about 200 MP3s on it. 
> It's not organized in any particular way with files classified in
> albums or put into folders or anything.  However, the player when
> it's in Shuffle mode doesn't seem all that random.  
> 
> For example, it recently has started about half of the time on
> Track 77.  It then generally plays a random song, but within the
> first 3 or 4 songs after that, it will play one of three or four
> particular songs, which aren't related in any way that I can tell,
> and don't have track numbers which are related to each other, as
> far as I can tell, such as being adjacent on the disc, or all
> ending in 0, or anything like that. 
> 
> I typically listen to this CD only on short trips, so I'll only
> play around 5-10 songs at a time, so this level of repetition
> seems unlikely to be the result of just a quirk of rolling the
> dice. 
> 
> Any ideas how it's choosing what songs to play?

I recall reading an article where a lot of people thought their iPods 
seemed to prefer certain songs or groups. True random doesn't seem 
random to us. I think Apple was working on algorithms to provide fake 
random that would sound more random than random.

That may be your problem. Or your player may have a really crappy 
randomizer.

The CD player I used to have in the Civic fits into that latter 
category. I used to have a CD with MP3s of 100 or more songs. I'd put 
it in on random. The selection seemed random enough. But eventually I 
noticed that the only random thing was which song played first. After 
that, the player would choose the next songs in the same "random" 
order every time. If the fist song was "Songbird" by Fleetwood Mac, 
the next one was always "Going to California" by Led Zeppelin. And 
that was always followed by "Boogie Shoes" by KC and the Sun****ne 
Band.

-- 
Opus the Penguin
Maybe there's just something about the way I look that screams out 
"cheese smuggler". - Bill Kinkaid