Although life is random, "Our brains aren't wired to understand randomness."

The problem is the random is being done on a song by song basis. Steven is looking at the artist and not the song. I'm sure apple could do another pass and keep the same artst from bunching up.

I am sure shuffle would be improved.

For reference, if we assume 300 albums, each with 10 songs, and we choose 100 songs, the chance of any given song coming up is approximately 1/30, and the chance of exactly three songs from a given album coming up is approxmiately 2.7%. So, the chance that the an album that had 3 songs chosen from it would have 3 songs on the next to loads is (2.7%) squared, or about .07%. Small, but within the realms of possibility.

If Mr. Levy simply means that any album had 3 songs chosen from it, then the probabilities get a lot better. Consider that with 300 albums x 10 songs, the chance of not choosing more than 1 song from any album is less than 10% at 39 songs, 1% at 54 songs, and 0.000004% at 100 songs. The chance of choosing not more than 2 takes more brainpower than I have available at the moment, but I guesstimate that it's less than 1%. It is thus USUAL that 3 or more songs would come from the same album, given the sample sizes.

On my mp3 cd player, random isn't actually random. I have figured out how it is randomized. The player randomly picks a FOLDER first, then picks a song. Here is a scenario in which this would matter. I have 3 folders, with blues, rock, and classical music. I only have one blues song and one rock song, so each of those gets chosen a third of the time. However, I have 10 classical songs, so each gets chosen one thirtieth of the time. Does the ipod shuffle have a similar problem?

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Anonymous wrote:
Does the ipod shuffle have a similar problem?

I can't be categorical, but my only answer is, "No."

Remember, the million-to-one chance happens nine times out of ten.

Yeah, you're just as likely to have the winning lottery numbers be 123456789 as 178431853.