News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

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 ilikehurdles on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @03:52PM (#20348070)
Do you have a source for that claim?

For me, random means: "I want to hear every song in this selection exactly once, chosen randomly". Random should mean uniformly distributed and I don't care whether the same artist or album is played back-to-back. I feel like this is exactly what "shuffle" has meant for decades before some UX quack at Spotify headquarters decided they knew better.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing mu... by shados on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @04:09PM (#20348251)
Thats why the feature is usually called "shuffle" rather than "random". Then if you stop to think about it a bit, the expected meaning is reasonably clear.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing mu... by kstenerud on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @03:57PM (#20348124)
So... what you're saying is that you don't want to hear the same song too soon after hearing it before?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing mu... by ilikehurdles on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @04:43PM (#20348564)
No, I’m saying I want to hear every song in the list exactly once before any is repeated. Your summary is more generous than my definition.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing mu... by iforgotpassword on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @05:31PM (#20349029)
That's shuffle, not random. Maybe randomized. With random, every song should have the same chance of being picked, which would technically allow the same song to play twice. If you'd let the player run for a decade, every song should have played about the same number of times.

But this usually leads to people perceiving the feature as not being random enough.

See Spotify for example: https://www.quora.com/Is-Spotifys-shuffle-feature-truly-rand...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing mu... by IanCal on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @06:37PM (#20349622)
Random has a lot of meanings, and you are picking a very specific one. It doesn't have to be uniformly distributed, for example, but relevant here is I don't think there's a problem describing a random shuffle as "random". It is playing a list in a random order.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing mu... by kstenerud on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @05:26PM (#20348983)
So... You'd say that my summary gets you 80% of the way there?
[ Parent | on HN ]