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A comment on Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing mu... by OJFord on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @03:30PM (#20347826)
> 3. I want it to "seem" random (don't play too many songs by the same artist in a row).

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
and then of course with the #2 variation on both variables.
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Re:Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing mu... by kbenson on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @03:38PM (#20347924)
You will get very weird results from that depending on your song library. If you have every song from a prolific artist, and one to two songl you like from a few other artists, you'll get a nice random distribution among artists, but not among your library. For very lopsided libraries, such as people that just started a service and maybe have added one or two full artist catalogues and a smattering of other songs they like that they thought of (which I imagine isn't all that uncommon, it's the state I commonly find myself in on a new service), it will result in a lot of repeats and ignoring a bunch of your library.
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