Re:How random is xkcd? (2015)
by stronglikedan on Thursday December 28, 2023 @10:18AM
(#38794199)
Their shuffle is completely broken, but so are all modern streaming music players. It used to be that shuffle would do just that - shuffle the deck of cards (playlist), and then deal the cards in order, never repeating until all cards have been dealt. Now it just keeps the playlist in the same order it was in and jumps all over the place, repeating songs and never playing some. It's very frustrating and woefully broken. Old media players did it correctly.
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Well, as long as you don't go too far back: Old hardware media players with shuffle (mp3 players, even my cd player had a shuffle button) often used the same random seed, resulting in the same random order. My guess would be by accident due to restarts not preserving information.
For what it's worth, in the streaming music players category, Apple Music does shuffle as you want it. Probably because it is an old(er) media player, just with a streaming service bolted on. (i.e. if you tell it to shuffle, it'll take the playlist, put it in a random order in your queue, then play through every song once.)
iPod Shuffle is the same.
Agreed; the suggestion that people just expect random shuffle to work differently from that seems well-meaning and rooted in some kind of truth but quite disconnected from the fact you stated. I'm not sure why media players that offer something other than a true "shuffle" can't just provide the option to have either functionality.