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."
My shuffle world random rocks (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:5, Funny)
Sex...
Drugs...
Rock and Roll...
Alcohol...
*rereads parent*
Slashdot...
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
"Started I random it like time, all shuffle much the I've so the using."
to:
"I like the random shuffle so much, I've started using it all the time."
How many times would it take to shuffle a series of songs back into their original album order?
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:5, Funny)
According to RIAA marketing, every 6 years.
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
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:4, Insightful)
Judging by the history of random number generators on cheap/small computers, that's probably not going to be all that very random.
Anyway, I did a quick search and it's lack of randomness has been discussed before [macslash.org].
Stop the madness! (Score:5, Funny)
The topic is music and how the order in which songs are played affects the phsyche and the soul, and you guys have likely turned it into a 50-100 post discussion/argument/rant on the proper statistics to apply in various and sundry situations.
My advice to everyone reading : Leave before its too late!
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:5, Funny)
This is proof that the people behind Zero Wing ("Somebody set up us the bomb!") were ahead of their time.
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:5, Funny)
Captain: It's you!!
CATS: How are you gentlemen!! All your Ace of Base are belong to us! You are on the Eve of Destruction.
Captain: What you say!!
CATS: You have no chance to survive Morris Day and the Time...
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:5, Interesting)
A) I like most genres of music, so shuffling gives me much more variety than listening to 20 songs from one artist, 20 from the next ad nauseum.
B) It's exciting not knowing what the next track will be! Will it be Paul Simon or Weird Al? Vanessa Mae or Mighty Mighty Bosstones? Nobody knows!
If there is a song in particular that I 'must immediately listen to' then it takes 2 seconds of scrolling and clicking and, bam, I can break the randomness for a moment.
The only time I use a set playlist order is when playing Unreal Tournament multiplayer - trance/techno really sets the mood for the gameplay so I'll fire up Tiesto and let 'em spool off.
Let's not forget that shuffling of this magnitude (not shuffling itself) is a new thing to play with. A few years ago it was a pain in the arse to keep changing CDs after one or two tracks, you'd usually listen out the whole album before changing.
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:3, Insightful)
It takes me just about 30 minuets to drive to work, which is a little more than half of a CD. If I listen to it in order, than everytime I play the CD I am going to here the same 6 to 7 songs, I could choose what I wanted to hear and program in a play list, but why bother when with a single button I get an assortment?
The above is even more true for MP3s, when you have a folder with 500 songs in it, it is tiresome to listen to it in te same order everytime, and it is a pointless bother to
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:5, Funny)
Is that faster or slower than 30 waltzes?
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The majority of albums these days are not like many of the albums of old where the song order really is important in telling a "story". They're simply a collection of songs stand-alone songs.
2) One artist/producer/marketeer/whoever' idea of the best song order is not going to be the same as anyone else's. Furthermore, I'm not going to credit that individual (or individuals) with being any more competent than I am at deciding what order I would like to listen to the songs on an album. Sorry for the rant, but I'm tired of "artists" insinuating that their vision is the only correct vision (ie Madonna thinking its an assault on her artistic vision and integrity for someone to want to buy only a single song from one of her albums).
3) We've been subjected to the "random" shuffle for decades -its called the radio (the DJ's I know are about as random as you can get).
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
And there are some albums that just should not be broken up, as other posters have been saying. Tool's Lateralus comes to mind as one I've been listening to rather often recently.
-Carol
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:4, Funny)
'Yes'
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:5, Interesting)
And I prefer something not quite so random [sf.net] myself.
Re:I like my entire music library on shuffle... (Score:3, Interesting)
It was great, we would record on cassette our favorite albums! And then we'd play them over and over when we wanted.
Where was the RIAA then? I rarely bought music back then as I always taped it off the radio.
Re:My shuffle world random rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry grasshopper, you lack understanding of true randomness. Once song A has been played (hence has a playcount of 1) It is just as likely to be chosen as any other song, and therefore the odds of acheiving a playcount of two are double those of any song not yet pla
Who would have thought? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:5, Funny)
Shufflin' 5 songs, doin' it for you
We're so bad we think it's good
Blowin' your mind like we knew we would
You know we're not repeatin' for fun
Recyclin' our stuff for everyone
'Cause we're not here to play good music
We're makin' money, get used to it
That's unfair; Clear Channel is totally random. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do shuffle right and you get the wide range of variety with suprises that ramdom playback provides. I setup an old system in my family room with over 2,800 song and set WinAMP to shuffle play. I haven't listened to radio at home for the last 8 months. No comercials, no DJ's flapping their gums and none of repititous crap. That amoun
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:3, Interesting)
What I am proposing is not sorted, but weighted randomization. iTunes would do what I want if it had selections like "Randomize with (strong|medium|weak|no) (positive|negative) correlations in (size|time|date added|year|artist|song name|composer|...)"
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, the Recently Played smart playlist comes already set up with iTunes. So does Top 25 Most Played, My Top Rated, and 60's Music.
My current fave smart playlist is one I set up called Unrated. It shuffles through all the songs I haven't assigned a rating to yet so I can hear them a few times and decide whether or not I like them.
IMMS, The Future of Shuffle! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who would have thought? (Score:3)
You say this as a joke, but you're right. I can attest, listening to Nine Inch Nails when you're depressed, isn't a smart thing to do.
Radio killed the album star... (Score:5, Interesting)
But, actually, radio play is not a truely random selection. Radio programmers mark certain slow-paced songs as "do not play in the morning drive" because nobody wants to be put back to sleep while driving to work. They also bias their selections towards favoring more popular songs, artists who are coming to town soon, recent "fresh" hits, and the songs that best define their format.
iTunes, Real, and nearly every other music organizing program are starting to catch onto this with their playlist generator, which very closely resembles the way that radio program directors deal with their playlists... setting a ruleset that creates a quasi-random base for their day, and then displaying the results for potential human manipulation.
The end result is that we're all basically running our own cluster of radio stations. Sometimes you feel like listening to the songs you've rated 5-stars, sometimes you want a mix of high-energy fast-paced songs, sometimes you want some soft background music. Each of those is defined as different playlist, and as new music is added into your system they automatically drop into the rotation on their appropriate lists.
So, there you have it. As much as we want to escape radio, we love it when we're the one running the board...
Artists killed the album star... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Artists killed the album star... (Score:3, Interesting)
"When it became just a bunch of songs thrown onto a CD as a delivery mechanism, the idea of the album lost its meaning."
Actually, I think you may be onto something here. I think the "delivery mechanism" of CDs is half of the problem. Since there's so much space to store music on a CD, there's a tendency to use it all. Thus, in the LP days, you got maybe 5-10 songs and a half hour listen out of an album. Maybe half those songs were good, on average. Presently, you get 12-17 songs on
Re:Radio killed the album star... (Score:5, Insightful)
I ocasionally work as a DJ, and this reminds me of something similar I was taught. I don't think radios do this as much - or at least, it's maybe not noticable from being interrupted with commercials and station id's - but it's something I do all the time listening to music at home.
Basically, play music in sets. You play a slow or downish song, and slowly build up into more energy over say 3-8 songs, and then drop back down again, basically going in waves. If you're going to jump genres, use connecting songs to switch (ie, going from rock to hiphop, you might play a fairly hard-rock song (at the top of the wave), move to something in the middle, play something of a rock-hiphop cross (Kazzer - When it rains it pours, off the top of my head), then play slow hiphop, and move up.
It makes the music 'flow', and, to me at least, makes a nicer listening experience.
I also don't really use random, but I pick semi-randomly from my collection and order them as I go. Something this article doesn't really point out is that while random CAN make interesting and good song orders, it can also (and IMO, more often) make bad selections, and play songs that don't sound good together. Maybe this is more important when you listen with crossfading (as I usually do), but it still bothers me anyways.
brain damaged ?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Temporal order is an important element of how a work unfolds dynamically over time, an important factor underlying the aesthetic effect."
Well, sure it is within a song, but saying that the order of songs within an album is important to the "aesthetic effect", is like saying that if I read a book by J. Random Author without reading all of his other books, in the order they were written, that I'm missing the effect.
A song, like a book (or book series), is a discrete unit of art. Sure it's similar to the other songs on that album, and sure it can be nice to listen to an entire album, in order, but where on earth does he find evidence for the claim that random shuffle appeals to "brain damaged" kids with short attention span.
Re:brain damaged ?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rock Operas are dead (thank god) (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:brain damaged ?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
While most moden albums do not ascribe to having the songs work together, this is not true historically. Dark Side of the Moon is probably the best example of this.
While I could argue in detail about this, Ive found that the best way to do this is to grab a dark side cd, put it in, listen to it the whole way through, then again on ran
Re:brain damaged ?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
A good example of that is Money, from DSotM. How many times have we heard that in radio playlists, and how many times (if ever) have we heard anything else from that album on the radio?
I really
Re:brain damaged ?!? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:brain damaged ?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Generally, an important attention-getting song is placed right at the very be
Hey (Score:5, Funny)
Re:brain damaged ?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not quite. In fact, I think that you were close when you said: A song, like a book (or book series), is a discrete unit of art.
A song is like a book, or a short-story. A good album is like a good book series - each episode mak
Re:brain damaged ?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Now, call me a cynic, but I'm not sure I really believe that a professor of marketing is the best source of information on what is more reasonably a neuropsychology or cognitive neuroscience question. (OK, so maybe marketing experts have some deep connection with brain damage, but I'm *trying* to be kind here.)
I can state this with authority because, marketing, after all, is not exactly brain surgery. :-)
I like a good mix, but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I like a good mix, but (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article,
On the other hand, you can set the iPod and iTunes to shuffle by Album. All of the songs on the album are played in order, then it jumps to another random album.
Expert (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Expert (Score:5, Funny)
Depends on which end of the disection scalpel he's on.
Soko
Re:Expert (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, here comes some flamebait, but I think in this case it's justified: the "expert" here is just another blowhard who thinks his generation is superior to the one following it. That's not an uncommon worldview, but it is little better than any other form of bigotry, and it goes without saying that it has no place in actual science.
I mean, look at the context his "brain damage" quote
Variety (Score:5, Interesting)
Give me Album Shuffle (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Give me Album Shuffle (Score:5, Informative)
Settings > Shuffle: Album.
Then select an artist in browse mode and hit play.
Re:Give me Album Shuffle (Score:3, Interesting)
attention span? uh... no. (Score:2, Interesting)
We don't have sort attention spans... (Score:2, Funny)
forward, please (Score:2)
what? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm outraged!
Who wants to go ride bikes?
Best is quasi-random shuffle... (Score:2)
It produces a stream with the same appeal as a college radio station -- loosely aligned with a particular format, but quirky and eclectic.
I take complete (Score:4, Funny)
Dain Bramage? (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably "Authority==Orderliness Nazi" Music has for the most part been shuffled on radio for years, except those stations that just play loops. Gotta slow down on reading up on such "authroities" I'm developing a sodium problem.
I doubt it. (Score:2)
huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
20,000 songs on IPod never been heard? (Score:2, Interesting)
The article states that they interviewed one person who has 20,000 songs in their collection to which the interviewee have never even given a listen.
Either this person bought 2000 albums just for the one song they liked and never listened to the rest, or (more likely) they pirate a whole lot of random stuff.
Either way: Unbelievable. Why would anybody waste time and hard drive space like that?
Re:20,000 songs on IPod never been heard? (Score:5, Interesting)
His next planned purchase is an Xserve RAID. I believe he is over half a terabyte now in ripped music and is looking for a better way to manage it all. And he is very eager for Apple to release a bigger ipod. Right not he has three that he uses regularly, with different subsets of songs on each.
Let me do the math.. (Score:3, Interesting)
CDs generally cost somewhere between $10 and $18, so let's be generous and say his average is $11. That would be $110,000 in CDs alone. In other words, this person should take out a nice insurance pol
Have I been dreaming? (Score:2)
Albums (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Artist knows best? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, I find out that was originally put like that because of vinyl limitations, and he's now moved "In Your Eyes" to the end. After 16.5 years of one track order, I can't quite get into the album as much with the new track order - it doesn't feel right to me.
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...
What's an El-Pee? (Score:5, Insightful)
The pod could handle shuffle better... (Score:3, Interesting)
What Professor Kellaris really means. (Score:4, Funny)
My parents' generation listened to music on 45s, where they get together and play songs at random. My generation listened to LPs where the songs were in a particular order every single time. My kids' generation listens to MP3s and play songs at random.
Obviously, both my parents' generation and my kids' generation are brain damaged, because us baby boomers never took drugs while going through college....
Well, this only applies to certain forms of music (Score:3, Informative)
"Brain Damaged" shufflers (Score:5, Insightful)
Should I point out to this idiot that we have something called "radio" that intermixes songs from multiple artists and albums, in an effort to provide what we call "variety"? Or that it predates xmms, winamp, and the ipod by several decades?
One would think a marketing professor would be familiar with these concepts.
I call bullsh*t (Score:4, Insightful)
who's the brain-damaged one here? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Personally, and I believe I speak for many old farts here, I appreciate listening to music, be it an opera or a pop album, in the sequence in which the artist decided to present it," he said.
"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."
This strongly depends on the quality and length of the album in question, IMO. Some albums need to be listened to in order (Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, Led Zeppelin I, and Hybrid's Wide Angle all come immediately to mind), but with the majority of CDs having no emotional continuity between songs, I see no reason not to skip around and only listen to what you feel like hearing. Besides, this argument doesn't address the popularity of mix CDs or the random shuffling of songs from multiple albums.
And, with music or any other form or art, what the artist intends to present in a piece of work is not always how the audience interprets it. Who's to say someone won't find more meaning in a random shuffle than in the original order of the same tracks?
The only thing she's right about is the fact that she is an old fart.
On a slightly related note, wasn't this the reason the Red Hot Chili Peppers (I believe) refuse to sell their music on iTMS? They want the CD to be appreciated as a whole, while their listeners wanted only a handful of the songs.
decontextualized songs and longevity (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure music people don't want tactics that increase the number of enjoyable plays. Its in the music industry's interests for customers to become tired of the music so people go buy more.
Most "artists" create with random shuffle (Score:4, Interesting)
> "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."
I call B.S.
Most artists today throw together a bunch of random songs in no particular order KNOWING that today's audience will be listening to individual tracks in a club, on the radio, or on 'random shuffle' on their player; Or they don't put that much thought into it at all.
This is probably dating me, but the last albums I recall that had a meaningful sequence were 'Pink Floyd The Wall', and maybe 'STYX Mr. Roboto'. Any more recent examples, please?
This is stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, most albums nowadays are built by marketing flacks, not artists. To suggest that I should submit my listening habits to anybody's judgements but my own is ridiculous.
Not new at all. (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't new to mix different songs from different albums - when I was a kid the cool thing was to make "mix" tapes with a double tape deck, and trade them around. It was always more fun to listen to somebody else's mix tape than your own, because that element of unpredictability was there.
The technology has changed, but the desire to listen to an varied list of music, in an order that is surprising, has nothing to do with "the kids today" and their short attention span.
The really great thing about today's technology isn't that you can shuffle all sorts of albums, but that you can include only the songs on the album that you like in the shuffle. That is the huge advantage over putting 5 cds into the changer and hitting 'shuffle'.
Pixie
Those damn teenagers! (Score:4, Insightful)
I have two observations:
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?
I'm too old to be brain damaged by MTV ... (Score:4, Interesting)
What I'd like to see is a Tivo-like feature where the player takes your preferences and downloads other songs that you might like as well. Sorting thru tons of dreck to find the gems is so, like, last century.
Personal "Greatest Hits" (Score:5, Insightful)
In an era where CDs rarely have more than one or two good songs anyway, I like to gather collections together on a single CD. Since the songs are from different CDs, different performers, etc., there is nothing to lose by telling the CD player to play them in random order.
Brain-damaged? Yeah, right...
...laura
predictable (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the music industry is horrified that the album, that high priced gold plated sacred cow of music commerce, is doomed. Artists make songs and the music labels make albums. End users listen to songs, but must buy albums to get them. The songs sell themselves, and users choke down the price of albums to get the songs.
The middle man, the record labels, touch all the money and most of it sticks to their fingers, but without the album there would be no middle man as such, and increasingly the online music stores are getting set up to cut the middle out. Since the music industry is mostly talentless marketing wonks who otherwise would have to market uncool things like vacuum cleaners, the extinction of the album as a concept would be a disaster and really cut down on the number of great parties and available women they have enjoyed up to now.
I hate shuffle (Score:3, Insightful)
I think though, it has to do with my style of music as well. I like techno and classical quite a bit, both of which are highly repetative and predictable. I often use music as a way to keep my mind focused while working, and so it has to follow a steady pattern. If it were to jump around, I'd probably get distracted by it. Sometimes I even pick a single song and leave it on repeat for hours. Rarely ever do I create playlists with mixed artists or albums, its either 1 song on repeat, or a full album on repeat.
Missing the real point - it's like radio (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Random Singles vs. Albums (Score:4, Interesting)
When I got my iPod I did have a great time listening to my entire 2000+ song collection on shuffle. There was certainly something about it that seemed cool and fresh. Certain songs popped out and other seemed less engaging than I thought.
After a few months, though, I got sort of tired of it. There was something unsatisfying... like watching a bunch of movie trailers instead of watching a movie. There is something to be said for a well constructed album that takes you on an extended journey. Even if I end up skipping one or two songs, listening in album or near album format does have a sort of depth to it you just don't get listening to singles collections.
Going back to albums was a bit uncomfortable at first -- I would find myself getting impatient for a change. But what's with that? Shouldn't I be able to relax and have someone tell me a good story? It took some time to get over the attention span deficit, but once I did, I did find myself able to get a deeper enjoyment from music again.
Just my thoughts.
What about the radio? (Score:5, Interesting)
i sent an email to Mr. Kellaris. (Score:5, Informative)
MoodLogic beats the random shuffle... (Score:4, Interesting)
The result is that it does a damn good job of playing unique playlists of music that are thematically grouped--they "go together." It's like having a REAL DJ who knows a lot about music pick your playlist for you.
You can pick any song, artist, album, or arbitrary "style" and MoodLogic will create a playlist for you on the fly with songs that fit that selection.
I can't emphasize how much of a difference this has made to my music listening - I used to listen to whole albums or make my own limited playlists because the random shuffle was TOO random. But MoodLogic actually exposes a WHOLE lot of individual tracks I normally don't listen to. Very nifty.
They've recently released a version of their software that will siphon music to your TiVo as well, if you have the Home Media Option installed (check TiVo's website for this download). Instead of playing albums straight throguh, you can build themed playlists on the fly with your TiVo interface from another room. Brilliant.
This is where things will head, I hope.
shuffle to avoid repetition. (Score:3)
However, I can't listen to one album by some pop tart all the way through because after ten minutes I'm really over hearing the exact same song played in a different key.