winamp "random" not so random

[zskillz]

This post has pretty much no meaning, but in the last month or two I have had the same 200 (or so) songs in my winamp playlist. I have had those songs in the same order for the duration. Being a musician, I noticed that no matter when I opened winamp, I was usually hearing mostly the same songs even though I had the setting on "random". Now I'm an extremely amateur programmer as well, but I've never encountered a situation where a programs random algorithm was actually noticibly not so hot. Anyway, I just was wondering if anyone else had noticied this before.

-Z

[daveleau]

Yes, I noticed the same thing. It will play the same songs in a not-so-random order.
Dave

[RayH]

Try another player, like Windows Media Player.

[seti]

That should be an easy theory to prove/disprove with say....a 3 song playlist.

[zskillz]

I'm not so sure about that seti... based on what I've studied in statistics, I would think that a larger sample size (bigger playlist) would give me more accurate results.
-Z

[gauge]

Did anyone ever notice that when you grab the files from lets say your napster folder with winamp several of the files are incomplete? Got any ideas?

[JimG]

Yeah, I noticed the "randomizer" is not so random. On my system, it really likes anything with D in the artist name. One other thing that helps is to click on "msc", and under there find "srt" . . . this will let you sort the list in a random way. Found out that by doing that and letting it play straight through is much better.

[Snowball2]

Jeez and I thought I was alone!! I have a song list of 1400 and it hits the same **** songs all the time!! I leave it on shuffle and everytime I hit fast-forward it goes thru the same list of songs! I wonder what would happen if you left it on for a day...would it hit the same songs over and over again?

Snow

[zskillz]

well, I was thinking about it, and it's a bit strange... u see, I'm not sure, but as far as I can tell, when you click the random button, it seems to run some sort of calculation that sets the order of all of the slots taken up in the playlist at one time (like an array). As it's running the calculation though, there may be somewhere where there is roundoff error. As a result it begins to repeat values (read as:plays the same song twice) in the array that is constructed based on the number of slots.

It seems to me that this is a good possibility because (if you haven't noticed) if you delete a song from the playlist, you can no longer hit the "back" button to go to a song that you've previously played. I would think that this is because when you deleted the song a new array was created based on the original number of slots minus the one that you just deleted.

hehe... wow, I should dedicate this much thinking to my inorganic chemistry homework instead!

-Z

[zskillz]

double post
-Z

[This message has been edited by zskillz (edited 02-25-2001).]

[Joel Kleppinger]

The non-randomness of Winamp's shuffle is quite obvious.

What it appears to do a lot is rotate back and forth across the playlist. Since I have a playlist of about 1300 songs and no more than 50-60 any given group, I've been able to test this to some degree of accuracy. I've noticed that if it's playing a song by a group with a decent # of songs (20 or more) now then within 2 or 3 songs after this one, another song by the same group will be played... or at least the song picked down the road will probably be very near the current song in the playlist.

So within a 7-9 song period, your odds are pretty decent that three songs by the same group if that group has a 3-5% share of the playlist. Obviously, this isn't random.

[Szech]

I noticed Winamp does this. I believe that if you put shuffle and repeat on, then it goes through a more "random" song selection mode.

[LiLRiceBoi]

do you guys recommend anything to "fix" this? or possible another player?

[jad1097]

www.musicmatch.com (http://www.musicmatch.com)

[zskillz]

hehe... nope, i'm to lazy, so I'll just make sure that I only have good songs on the playlist, and I'll shuffle them once in a while
-Z

[LiLRiceBoi]

does musicmatch use a lot of system resources???