Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?

[S]ampling is typically done "without replacement", i.e., one deliberately avoids choosing any member of the population more than once. Although simple random sampling can be conducted with replacement instead, this is less common and would normally be described more fully as simple random sampling with replacement.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_random_sample

Shuffle (mostly) used to do what you expected when you had a medium like CD with a small number of tracks.

As the number of available tracks grew, the definition became less and less obvious.

With a service like Spotify, you could design an entire multi-page specification to cover all the different possible "shuffle" options you could give users - all of which would be useful in at least some settings.

Instead of which users get one button and some guessing.

OP wants "Shuffle my playlist into a random order and then play it through"

You are thinking closer to "After this song is done, choose a new song at random among ALL available."

Spotify's is a mixture, while good offline clients tend to go to the first.

The term found on a lot of music players is not "random", it is "shuffle", and this is an important distinction. The term comes from cards. Take a deck of cards, shuffle it, and turn each card over in order from top to bottom. You expect that every card in the deck will be seen once and only once; turning up, say, two eights of clubs in a row means that something is dreadfully wrong with your deck.

Humans tend to expect a similar behavior from "shuffle" modes: the same song does not repeat for a while. If people are shuffling by song, then they may also expect that performers don't repeat within a (smaller) timeframe.

Nobody expects "pick a random number between 1 and numsongs, play that song, repeat, and be perfectly happy to play Baby Shark forty-seven times in a row if that number keeps on coming up".

Of course it is, the concept of randomness is much broader than you allow for. The specific issue you refer to here is if you are sampling with or without replacement - both are valid.

There is another issue which is the distribution you use. Should songs be equally likely to occur, or should the ones you've played more occur more likely?

You may also extend sampling strategies to genre, or to exclude repeated artists, or whatever - but all of these things could still be done via random sampling.

I am indecisive about what music I want to listen to in this current moment and I want you to give me options that I will deny until I become decisive about what I want.

I mainly dont want to hear a playlist that starts with the same tune every time and then progresses through the same order of tunes when I select Random.

So often, in Google Play Music selecting random will play any of of 10 pre-set playlist cues.... The tunes will be a mix of one big polaylist that just starts at various points on the master playlist. This is why I often run across the same tunes, and why they follow each other in the exact same order.

e.g.

Normal Play Cue: A-B-C-D-E-F-G

Random is selected -

Random play attenpt 1. B-A-C-D-F-G-E (Several tunes present on the micro SD card never play)

Random play attenpt 2. F-G-E-B-A-C-D (Several tunes present on the micro SD card never play)

Random play attenpt 3. B-F-G-E-A-G-E (Several tunes present on the micro SD card never play)

I prefer the "Shuffle" feature I guess if you want to look at the semantic side of this discussion, where not tune is played twice or in the same order whenever the random button is pressed, and every time I press random, the player should recall the last tune, and pick a new playable tune each time the skip button is pressed or after the prior tune comes to an end.

This could have the appearance of #4.

I hate the trend from product managers of responding to "wow there's a lot of things people might be intending here" with "let's just pick one in the name of simplicity." Give me the hooks to let me make my own solutions for the other possibilities!

That can still be random, for as long as we're not defining the variable:

    from $artists choose artist randomly
    from $artist.repertoire choose song randomly
    play $song

Easiest solution that gets you 99% there would be to make a shuffled list, run through the whole thing, then shuffle again. The only reason why this wasn't done in the past was lack of RAM, which isn't an issue anymore.

Or if RAM really actually is an issue on your embedded device, use a Debruijn sequence.

It's odd to hear that this is not standard, given that it's a standard algorithm. Maybe memory limitations?

I’ve definitely seen scenarios where I’ve heard the same random play order due to some fuckery with a car Bluetooth connection.

Lots of music players started out with true randomness and then dialed it back because people complained that it wasn’t very random.

Anyone outside of HN would interpret that as broken random. So we can throw it out.

> 2. I want it to play in a truly random fashion, without replacement (each song is removed from the list once played).

Nope, not good enough for non-specialist randomness.

> 3. I want it to "seem" random (don't play too many songs by the same artist in a row).

Bingo. It should definitely seem random. Because the string "seem random" equals "random" for someone who isn't a technical expert in randomness.

> 4. I want it to be random, but predictable (same "random" ordering if I start the playlist again).

Normies don't care about random seeds for pseudorandom number generators, so nope.

> 5. I want it to play my favourite songs more often than my lower-rated songs.

That's a bonus feature that can be implemented with a slider.

> 6. I want it to play my less-commonly played songs more often than the stuff I listen to all the time.

Same as above

> So: what exactly do you want when you say random?

One obvious definition for normy random, plus a slider with least and most favorited at the left and right, respectively.

Done.

We've come so far with UI design now that we can't have that.

Maybe it is not the way i’d order my playlist, but I trust Spotify knows their stuff. There must be a lot of engineering there.

Why not trusting the musical tastes of a robot, after all?

TL, dr: Bad product management, that didn't stop coders from featurecreeping

While I'm on my soapbox, another tremendous annoyance I want to get rid of: "Deluxe" tracks. I'm so tired of scrolling through re-released/deluxe versions of albums to find the album with the original track listing. I don't want remixes or rough cuts in my random playlist. With all of the shallow marketing attempts at selling the same classic albums to the general public over and over again, the alternate tracks outnumber the original.

Eventually someone kindly wrote a plugin that did pretty much this using what we all agreed was the best way: the under-loved `grouping` tag. Caveat: I haven't actually tried it yet...

(Please file a Github issue if you try it but it doesn't work...)

That theory also explained the disconnect between the complaints and Apples response. Apple would indeed be right that the music was randomized, but not continuously, as consumers expected.

It was never clear to me what the issue actually was, perhaps we really don't understand randomness.

My point being, even mathematicians might mistakenly believe that repeating a song or artist is less random. The creators of the Enigma machine were not dumb, but they believed that repeating letters would be more predictable and thus less random.

Since then I've not had it any service or software I use, it's the missing killer feature for me. I want "random"/recommended albums not recommended/random songs.