When I put my I-Pod on shuffle, there are always about 8 albums that songs get picked from.
It will play other stuff inbetween the albums, but will invariably go and use one of those albums every fith or sixth song.
It's almost like it chooses a small section of the drive and just randomly picks songs from that section an no where else.
Anyone else have this problem?
Anyone know a solution?
yeah, everything works normally.
I don't even think there is a problem.
I think it's just the way the I-Pod works.
My girlfriends does the same kind of thing.
Like I said, it just seems to pick a section of the drive to choose songs from, it's as if it is incapable of using the entire drive to choose random songs from?
I think alot of Mp3 players work that way, I have a Creative Labs player that does the same thing. I have over a 1000 songs on there and when I have it on random play it might play 4 or 5 songs from the same CD with in an hour.
it has to do with the seeding of the random number generator, something that is difficult to do even with powerful computer programs to get a truly random number because of the algorithms involved. It might help to hook your iPod to your PC every so often after changing the sorting of the songs in iTunes or adding/subtracting a tune. Of the 4 MP3 players I've owned (Neuros, Creative, iRiver and now my iPod) the iPod has done a FAR better job of shuffling than the others.
On mine, when I set it to play shuffle between several albums by the same artist, I can almost predict the exact pattern it does it in. Seems like certain songs are always played after other ones. Creature has the same reasoning I had - the random number generator uses the same patterns over and over.
I think it also weights the shuffle by how many times the song has been played or how it's rated.
That sounds reasonable.
I've mentioned to my friend how the I-Pod doesn't seem to play the crap songs - meaning the more obscure album tracks - it seems to play the "hits".
I had that problem with my computer once. Turns out I had it on shuffle, but only to shuffle through those songs I had recently played. Drove me nuts for a while until I figured that out.
