it repeatedly brings up the same albums at the front of the list and ignores many others.

You could be describing something that's just an interesting statistical coincidence.

However, the more time I spend with this car player, the more I think that its randomization routines aren't all that random. The notes in this thread (and others), combined with my experience, are leading me to be increasingly suspicious.

This article, although not related to the compiler that's used to make the empeg software, gives some insight into how the randomizers built-in to a language might not be right, and how a programmer might work around the problem.

I tend to agree. I hear alot of the same stuff. Also get groupings of the same artist more than randomness allows for. (ie...MANY of my artists only have a couple tracks on the player, yet they end up with playing with only one song between them all the time)

There is no question in my mind that the randomization routines need to be improved. I only have 500 albums in my player. That isn't so many. when randomly choosing one of the albums(ie, folders ) from a list of 500 or less...it should not be difficult after months of using this thing to hear just about any of the albums in there. However there are definitely certain ones that have NEVER come up near the front of the list...and others that repeatedly come up at the front of the list. Over and over...

I understand that they improved the shuffle mode to keep track of most often played, most recently played, etc..in order to sort those to the bottom of the list....which is great..but from what I can tell that only applies when using Shuffle mode. When I'm using the player with Shuffle-mode off...and I have the top level playlist set with the Randomized order attribute....I definitely get the not-so-random playlists coming up time and time again....no matter how many times I've heard that damn album that keeps coming up at the front. Its gotten to the point where I now find the random feature useless because I'm sick of hearing the same albums it always sorts to the front. So I'm back to just manually trying to think of albums and then choosing them manually. But I much preferred the notion of having my player just randomly pick an album for me....and the first item in the list should always be completely random...not repeatedly the same one.... There should be absolutely equal chance of any one of my 500 albums coming up as the first one in the list. At right now..that is DEFINITELY not the case.

I defninitely agree with you.

On my 10GB, I would put the thing into shuffle and get the same damn songs within the first 100 or so in the playlist. Yet I'd NEVER get other songs.

I find it particularly interesting that I had one song that accidentally got a Plays=33 on it (while others were below 10). From then on, it never came up in any of my shuffles again (at least not anywhere near the beginning).