The Joy of Random Shuffle 718
ajayvb writes "Wired has this article on how the iPod and other music players have brought random shuffling of songs to the fore. This generation seems to like their music that way, and according to one of the authorities in the article, it's because they are likely 'brain damaged' and have lower attention spans. Ouch."
Re:I like a good mix, but (Score:3, Informative)
The Wall is one of my favourites too. My approach is to keep the DVD around for when I want the whole thing, and keep some of the tracks with the most flow into each other encoded together.
Artist knows best? (Score:5, Informative)
"Temporal order is an important element of how a work unfolds dynamically over time, an important factor underlying the aesthetic effect. Random shuffle pretty much flushes that down the toilet."
He is assuming, of course, that the songs being listened have any real order. A good deal of the albums produced have no theme, no real order, and are just collections of songs. This is especially true for rock/pop/blues stuff. Listening to an album in order just means you get a preset random chunk of tracks vs a dynamic random chunk of tracks... not to mention you often find that you only like several songs on a given album.
Shuffle rules! (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes there's no substitute for listening to an actual album in order, but shuffle is a nice way to introduce some serious variety - there's nothing like hearing Coltrane followed by Queens of the Stone Age...
Re:Give me Album Shuffle (Score:5, Informative)
Settings > Shuffle: Album.
Then select an artist in browse mode and hit play.
Re:brain damaged ?!? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, this only applies to certain forms of music (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:5, Informative)
If you have 9 songs, then there's 9! (362,880) possible permutations, I think. (I'm a statistician, but it's my day off, so I get to be lazy and not think too hard about this.)
So, the probability of getting the exact order of the album would be 1/362880, which is about 0.0000028. Okay, it's pretty unlikely, but it could happen, especially if you listen to that album a lot. Another way to think about it: every time you play the ablum on shuffle, the chosen play order you hear only had a probability of 0.0000028 of being chosen.
Assumption: shuffle w/o replacement. If you have shuffle with replacement (as one of my CD players does), it's even less likely.
--RJ
Brain damage and order are all relative (Score:4, Informative)
That said, I do think there is some value in listening to albums in track sequence. Like other posters have pointed out, presumably the artists put the tracks in that order for a reason (although, more likely, a marketroid put the tracks in that order, but I digress) and since the emotional effects that a lot of posters have been alluding to are cumulative, you're clearly missing out if you always listen randomly. I mean, if there were no value to listening to songs in a particular sequence, what would the point of creating playlists be?
considerate shuffle-play (Score:2, Informative)
It does acoustic analysis and then generates playlists with attention paid to tempo, dominant frequencies, and user-specified ratings and colour.
Shuffle Extra, With Winamp (Score:5, Informative)
On Winamp, if your listening to a huge random playlist of songs, but you want to hear a particular song after the one your listening to, just select the song in the playlist and hit 'Q'. Winamp will finish the currently playing song, then play the song you selected, then return to randomly shuffling the tracks automatically. You can do this with multiple tracks, picking an order you want to hear those songs, and then having Winamp shuffle the rest.
Or just hit 'J' to search the list of the songs in the playlist, and select the song(s) you want to enqueue.
Awesome!
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Let me do the math.. (Score:2, Informative)
I don't like to encode on the fly, and I like to normalize the tracks that increases the time. I also add-in the time it takes me to correct CDDB information, and polish the disc with a microfiber cloth.
The actual rip and encode at 192kbps takes about 15-20 minutes. Which is about the time a new CD takes these days since the CDDB information is generally correct for new stuff, and there are no scratches on the CD to polish.
IMMS, The Future of Shuffle! (Score:3, Informative)
I think of it as Meldroc Radio - all the songs I like, all the time, without obnoxious ads or babbling DJs.
i sent an email to Mr. Kellaris. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:5, Informative)
Its so sad... the DJ sits infront of a monitor, reads the prompts and every few minutes the silence (in the sound booth) is broken by a mostly scripted blurb.
basically, todays DJ is the opposite of a reboot monkey in the IT industry.