Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

what is "True random shuffle "

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per01:
Your cluster theory makes sense to me and I accept that as the answer.

I will now crawl back under my stone (to paraphrase  Richard Thompson) and continue to lurk and learn from the Rockbox community.

Have you noticed that this thread has the most page views after the top 3? This subject must be on the minds of many Rockbox users. Anyway Happy Holidays to everyone reading this and to those people responsible for this great firmware.

saratoga:

--- Quote from: per01 on December 18, 2010, 07:17:16 PM ---
Have you noticed that this thread has the most page views after the top 3? This subject must be on the minds of many Rockbox users.

--- End quote ---

It has a lot of page views because its 4.5 years old, and old threads have more views then new threads.  I think if this mattered to people they'd have used the last 4 years to figure out if the shuffle was random enough.

Llorean:
Actually, if we ignore the three stickied posts and sort all of the posts in "General Discussion" by page views, it's ranked 215 or so (it's on page 11 at 20 per page, 2 from the bottom, minus the three stickies).

This is more or less what we're talking about - a quick glance at information can lead to one conclusion but when you take the time to actually investigate it may turn out that that conclusion isn't soundly supported by the all of the data.

It'd be great if someone who's experiencing "non-random shuffle" would produce some data since that would clear things up once and for all if it is non-random, and would settle your own mind if it turns out to really be random.

[Saint]:
It seems to me that the people bickering about "true random shuffle" don't actually *want* "true random shuffle" but instead merely think they do based on what they believe it to be...

When I read this I see a large amount of "I played a shuffled playlist and I heard more than one track from the same arbitrary group in the same arbitrary period....this can't *possibly* be "true random shuffle".

When what these people don't seem to realise is that yes, it is "random"..."truly random", and what they fail to realise is that because of that fact there is absolutely nothing stopping the tracks from not being grouped into similar artists/albums/etc out of sheer coincidence...because there's nothing that makes sure that this can't happen...it's random.

The people arguing for "true shuffle" seem to really want a precisely shuffled list whereby they will hear no two tracks from the same artist/album/etc in the same arbitrary period...ever.
As for some reason this is deemed to be "not random enough".

The point I feel has been missed here is that because of the fact that it is entirely random, it's absolutely possible that you could "shuffle" a playlist into the exact same order you began with...so there would be NO perceived difference at all when it is actually a different playlist and randomness simply presented you with the same order because it has no reason to NOT do that.



[St.]

Llorean:
I think we covered that point back with
--- Quote ---If you reshuffle each time, luck could present you with all of his songs, in order, as the first things you hear every single time. Or you could never hear them. That's why it's called "random."
--- End quote ---
though not quite in as much detail.

I'd also like to make it clear that nobody here is denying the possibility of a bug that causes non-random playback or stacked playlists. Just that evidence so far indicates that playlists are randomly shuffled and that some hard data about exactly what's happening, and how these not-entirely-random playlists are created would be necessary.

For example, a bug may not present itself when a playlist is created then shuffled, but may when a collection is recursively inserted with "insert shuffled." And even then it may only occur if the library is above or below a certain size, or is organized a certain way. This of course *should* never happen, or isn't expected to, but because of the number of permutations involved in library composition and playlist creation it's more or less impossible for someone to test everything, which is why we keep saying "if you're experiencing this, please provide data so that it can be investigated."

Saying "I think it happens but am only chiming in to support this view" doesn't really accomplish anything, and not yet providing data (for whatever reason - time available, a fear it's only asked for to try to prove you wrong, or whatever) also means the problem will remain unsolved if it exists.

You don't even necessarily have to analyze it yourself. Create a shuffled playlist, save it, and repeat. Document how you do it, and do it a few dozen times (an effort of five minutes or less) and then .zip them up and upload them somewhere for someone else to do the analysis on. At the very least it's a start.

And, if you do look into it and find that it's actually random, please post it here so that we're not left with a lingering doubt that there may be some obscure bug out there messing up random playback in some use case or other.

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