It’s been years since I dabbled with programming, but how hard can it be for these music app developers to make a random list of your songs, and pop every played song from the list until it’s empty and then repeat.
I remember reading decades ago how music player devs would implement proper random playback and people would complain that it’s not really random because it played the same song second time soon after the first. So the devs had to change it and make it less random…
Thats why some players have “random” and “shuffle”.
Random is truly random, it might play the same two songs multiple times back to back. Highly unlikely, but it might.
Shuffle has a thing built in that avoids a song if it has been played within X amount of time or plays. Some shuffles might have other criteria as well.
I remember reading this about the iPod, where they programed it to not play the same artist multiple times in a row or within certain number of songs of each other.
You wouldn’t even need to pop songs off the list, just shuffle, go through the playlist, shuffle then restart the playlist.
But the music app developers aren’t trying to give you true randomness. They’re using machine learning algorithms to try and guess what you really want.
Nothing does what it says it does anymore, everything’s trying to second guess you. I hate it.
Actually it’s worse. Spotify will explicitly tell you when you randomize your liked songs list that they play bands who pay for the privilege more often.
defgetNextShuffle(songs):
randList = random.sample(songs, k=len(songs))
for song in randList:
yield song
Didn’t include persisting it to storage for brevity. Only tricky part would be detecting when the source playlist changes and how to handle that. Personally I’d just append any new songs to a random position in the unplayed portion, while removal is obviously simple
This dude (famous for “do you guys not have phones?”) actually has a pretty good YouTube series on interesting ways to tackle programming challenges. He’s got one on randomness that I thought was pretty cool: https://youtu.be/2anY9ICA-Pg
It’s been years since I dabbled with programming, but how hard can it be for these music app developers to make a random list of your songs, and pop every played song from the list until it’s empty and then repeat.
I remember reading decades ago how music player devs would implement proper random playback and people would complain that it’s not really random because it played the same song second time soon after the first. So the devs had to change it and make it less random…
Thats why some players have “random” and “shuffle”.
Random is truly random, it might play the same two songs multiple times back to back. Highly unlikely, but it might.
Shuffle has a thing built in that avoids a song if it has been played within X amount of time or plays. Some shuffles might have other criteria as well.
The algorithm the grandparent comment suggests is equally random. It’s just that it’s a random sequence rather than a random selection.
I remember reading this about the iPod, where they programed it to not play the same artist multiple times in a row or within certain number of songs of each other.
Previous comment wants random order not fully random
You wouldn’t even need to pop songs off the list, just shuffle, go through the playlist, shuffle then restart the playlist.
But the music app developers aren’t trying to give you true randomness. They’re using machine learning algorithms to try and guess what you really want.
Nothing does what it says it does anymore, everything’s trying to second guess you. I hate it.
Actually it’s worse. Spotify will explicitly tell you when you randomize your liked songs list that they play bands who pay for the privilege more often.
def getNextShuffle(songs): return random.choice(songs)Vs
def getNextShuffle(songs): randList = random.sample(songs, k=len(songs)) for song in randList: yield songDidn’t include persisting it to storage for brevity. Only tricky part would be detecting when the source playlist changes and how to handle that. Personally I’d just append any new songs to a random position in the unplayed portion, while removal is obviously simple
This dude (famous for “do you guys not have phones?”) actually has a pretty good YouTube series on interesting ways to tackle programming challenges. He’s got one on randomness that I thought was pretty cool: https://youtu.be/2anY9ICA-Pg