[masraum]

Originally Posted by Dottore

This is clearly a trite question, but so what.

Has anyone else noticed that the "random songs" feature on an iPod is not really random? The same sequences of songs are played regularly. Some songs never appear. Some appear with incredible frequency. Some albums appear to be favoured. etc

Anyone know what accounts for this?

I used to be frustrated by the "shuffle" mode. I have several playlists on my iPod. With 1200 songs, I have a Jazz pl, Classic Rock, classical, etc.... A couple hundred songs each works well.

Anyway, I used to be frustrated by shuffle because I noticed that it was the same order every time.

I then discovered that I was using it wrong. I eventually got pissed and did some Internet sleuthing to figure out my problem.

If you have a playlist, and you click the center button to enter the playlist and then hit play, you bypass the shuffle feature. I assume that it's the same if you go into "artist" or "genre" or whatever. If you highlight the category that you want to play and then hit play, you actually get a random sampling in a random order. With a little over 400 songs in my classic rock playlist, listening in the car and at work (about 10 hours), I don't think I normally hear the same song twice.

Yeah, I think the problem is more about the control surrounding shuffle being counterintuitive than the shuffle feature not actually working well.