I figured I'd ask here first, before posting this as a bug.

It seems the Shuffle doesn't work as well as it should. I'll turn on shuffle and play a genre playlist of say 200 songs. I have very few repeating artists in the playlist (no more than two songs, usually). Yet, multiple times while skipping through the playlist, I'll get the same artist back-to-back.

At first I thought it was coincidence, but I've been noticing it an awful lot. Has anybody else seen this?

I think this will end up being a "your mileage may vary" topic, but I don't get this behavior at all. Shuffle is very random and I don't get many repeat artists. If I do, I assume it's a random occurrence.

Over in the Wish List forum there was talk about having the shuffle explicity separate same-artist songs from a shuffle, but at this point it's just a wish list item.

I have been trying to say this for a long time. The randomization routines on the player leave something to be desired. I do not know why it happens. There have been some extremely long discussions on the BBS in the past about this.

When directly asked about this issue at the Wooside meet, Hugo simply said, "That's statistically interesting."

However, I get situations like the following:

- I have nearly two thousand songs on my player.

- I have exactly two songs on the player by Men At Work.

- I do a full shuffle of the player's root directory.

- The two Men At Work songs play within one song of each other, like this: "It's a Mistake", some other song, "Land Down Under".

This happens in larger scales, like:

- Song from Ray of Light
- some other random song
- Another song from Ray of Light
- some other random song
- Another song from Ray of Light
- some other random song
- Another song from Ray of Light

This has been happening since day one and is even happening on 2.0b3 with the Least Recently Played shuffle.

...and I still like this "feature" (though the option of an eve more random shuffle would be good as well). That said, the Least Recently Played shuffle seems to "suffer" from it less than the standard shuffle

I listen to the entire player database (over 2,500 tunes) shuffled most of the time and I get this kind of 'clumping' of artist/album all the time. I guess it's actually a clumping of FID rather than anything else so I suppose that if you were to load the tunes into the player in a staggered order (and I don't mean staggered by one or two tunes) you would reduce the occurrence of this particular 'feature'. I thought it was an accepted fact that this was a bug in the player software but reading the other posts it seems that some people don't get this happening to them. Odd, very odd indeed.

Tony, I just upgraded to 2.0b3 and am seeing very similar results to what you described. Further, while doing a shuffle of my top-level, I seem to be getting only tracks from one of the sub-playlists (my "download" list).

This absolutely was not happening when I was running 1.03. Not even close. I may get two tracks by Bob Marley within 20 tracks, but they'd probably be from two different discs. And I doubt they have any code to check for such things (read my post about shuffle in the wish list).

Ugh, this is pretty nasty. I didn't used to use any type of random when listening to CDs, mainly because I thought it was useless changing discs through the magazine in the car or carousel at home. With the immediate nature of spinning tunes off a hard drive, I think it's a feature I'll use quite often (yeah, yeah Archeon... You don't realise how useful something is until you start to play with it :)

Another strange thing about updating to 2.0... I had exactly 5859 songs being listed on the empeg with 1.03 - the EXACT number of tunes I actually have. For some reason there's now a mystery digit floating around, so it reads 5860. Weird.

Bruno

yeah, yeah Archeon... You don't realise how useful something is until you start to play with it :)

What? I wasn't going to say anything! Honest!

What? I wasn't going to say anything! Honest!

Hahaha. Sure.

Wouldn't you know it? After turning off shuffle and then cycling some modes, the problems are gone. The track list reads fine (it MUST have been picking up one of the tracks twice - don't know why).

The shuffle now isn't doing the annoying thing it was before. I think with some advanced tracking (which in reality makes it less random) I think we'd be good to go.

I'm going to avoid commenting on any possible bugs/quirks until the next beta. Then if you thought flying penguin attacks were something, hold on to your hats. :)

Bruno

Doesn't think he could ever run 1.03 full-time anymore. :)