Why does Party Shuffle in itunes not work?

July 28, 2005 12:21 PM

Why does the random feature (party shuffle) on my itunes SUCK, IE work very badly..

I just want to hear ALL of the songs on my computer... not the same damn 100 or so... I do not have the button click "play higher ranking songs more often" and I have the library properly set ... so what else can it be? Is there anyway to fix this?

posted by crewshell to computers & internet (19 comments total)

Don't use Party Shuffle. Just select "Library" in the Source list on the left side, click the shuffle button on the bottom-left (the one with the crossing arrows), and press Play. You'll get everything in your library in a random order.
posted by xil at 12:36 PM on July 28, 2005

Radosh has some great thoughts about the iPod shuffle algorithm on his blog. There are also several good links in the comments section, which include a few workaround suggestions, but nothing perfect. I've put a lot of Google-fu into finding a way to hack my iPod's shuffle feature into something better, but no joy yet.
posted by junkbox at 12:38 PM on July 28, 2005

I've seen a lot of weird behavior with the itunes shuffle. A couple of days ago, I had it shuffling the whole library and it played 8 different songs, then those same 8 songs again in the same order.

I also seem to have certain songs that come up every single time, but that's probably just the drugs talking.
posted by selfnoise at 1:19 PM on July 28, 2005

What I did was do a few Smart Playlists, each with a different ratio of songs -- if you're curious I did:

2-star songs
3-star songs
4-star songs
5-star songs
hi-rated long songs
low rated long songs
most played
never played stuff
new stuff
new unrated
shorts (stuff under a little over a minute)
Stuff To Hear More Often (which is a live-updating smart playlist fed from a separate, non-smart playlist filled with just random, favorite songs that I'd like to hear all the time)
Spice (Ironic type mp3s which are amusing once in a while but not all the time)
Terre (A special category for the Terre Thaemlitz Rubato stuff I want to pop up a little more often, but not _reeal_ often)

With Live updating checked, and each one has a "Not Played In X Days" rule as well, to keep stuff cycling out. The "never played stuff" keeps making sure new stuff gets filtered in (if your play counts are all above one, I'd recommend, say, setting that to "play count less than 2 or thereabouts"); the 2-5 star ratings are all stuff that's shorter than about 6 minutes, and the long song categories are all for stuff that's longer than that -- just because it's kind of a pain if you're listening to party shuffle and a bunch of stuff that's 10 minutes long plays right after another, especially if people are around, and it's providing the music for a party or whatever).

Anyway, after tweaking all the ratios and such by setting the "Limit To X Songs", I open a new smart playlist, which is compiled from _all_ of those playlists, and that actually has doing pretty well, actually. And the cool thing with that, is, assuming you've rated all/most of your music, you don't really need to check the "Play higher rated stuff more often", since your ratios should take care of that anyway.

It depends on how you want it, though -- if you just want it so it only plays a song again after everything else has been played, totally do xil's plan; but if there's a hunk of songs you'd like to hear, you just want to make sure you get a good mix of Favorites and New Stuff, you might play around with the smart playlist settings. (Those are _so_ fun.)

Also -- if you do this, a good hint is to name your Massive Smart Playlist With All The Other Smart Playlists Feeding It something like "@Radio Station" or something, so it pops up to the top of the "playlist select" sheet. And make sure you hit "live updating" on all of the smart playlists, otherwise you'll be stuck with the same ol' stuff.

(and if you're curious, my ratios are:
2-star songs (70 songs; not played in last 2 months)
3-star songs (125 songs; not in last 20 days)
4-star songs (200, 10 days)
5-star songs (250, 5 days)
hi-rated long songs (30 songs, 20 days, ratings 3-5 star)
low rated long songs (10 songs, 10 months, ratings 2 star)
most played (100 songs, last 3 days)
never played stuff (75 songs)
new stuff (150, not played in last 1 day, date added in last 15)
new unrated (no limit on songs/last played, since I typically rate them when they come up, so they go into the other lists)
shorts (165 songs, 2 months -- I've got a lot of these)
Stuff To Hear More Often (300 songs, last 5 days)
Spice (75 songs; 45 days -- again, got a lot of these, too)
Terre (10 songs, last 20 days)
Total @Radio Puppy (my name for it) # of Tracks: 1557

Party Shuffle is neat, but it needs a lot of tweaking and massaging to get it to be useful and be what you want. But it's typically actually pretty rewarding once you do. (My only complaint is that sometimes it'll put the same song in the Party Shuffle Playlist twice, but that can be guarded against by shortening the amount of Advance Song Displaying.)
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 1:32 PM on July 28, 2005 [1 favorite has favorites]

Personally I think all these claims that iTunes or iPod shuffles are not random are simply people seeing patterns where they do not exist. People are good at doing that.

Good unbiased random number generators are easily written, and it seems very unlikely that these ones are anything other than fair. People used to claim that iPods were selecting songs that sounded good together and that was totally unfounded - can you imagine Apple writing such a feature (which would be far from easy) and not publicising it?

It's basically ridiculously easy to get a shuffle algorithm right, and very hard to get it wrong in the way people describe. If you think you have a problem then make the adjustments Rev. Syung Myung Me suggests and get on with listening to your music.
posted by edd at 1:42 PM on July 28, 2005

Good unbiased random number generators are easily written.

No, they're not.

However, a pseudorandom number generator sufficient for shuffling songs in a playlist is easily written.

&lt/nitpick&gt
posted by Jairus at 1:46 PM on July 28, 2005

(The live preview lies. It lies!)
posted by Jairus at 1:46 PM on July 28, 2005

Jalrus: ok, but good enough ones are easy enough to get from a textbook.
posted by edd at 1:55 PM on July 28, 2005

Rev. Syung Myung Me: How many total songs do you have in your library? Did you rate them as you add songs, or did you have to spend a big chunk of time going through and rating things?

Also - do you use this system on an iPod? Does live updating work on the iPod, or will the playlist remain static once you sync with iTunes?
posted by mullacc at 2:28 PM on July 28, 2005

Tip for those of you who have totally borked Party Shuffles. Mine ended up having my entire library in there, even when I told it to only have 10 songs. Turns out.. you can "Clear" the Party Shuffle without removing the songs, much like any other playlist. Just Cmd+A, right click then clear. It'll reset the Shuffle. You can do this if you get too many weird combos coming up too.
posted by wackybrit at 2:38 PM on July 28, 2005

edd, the problem is that the iTunes shuffle is *way* too mathematically random. True random is useless for shuffling music, because after one U2 song has played you're just as likely to get another U2 song -- or even the same damn song again.

What they should have done is make it so that the same artist won't be played within a few hours, or tracks from the same album won't be played until at least 80% of other albums have been played.
posted by bonaldi at 2:50 PM on July 28, 2005

(my solution has been to set to random play a smart playlist of songs "not played in the last 14 days")
posted by bonaldi at 2:52 PM on July 28, 2005

Personally I think all these claims that iTunes or iPod shuffles are not random are simply people seeing patterns where they do not exist. People are good at doing that.

Well, that's a tidy answer, but easily proven wrong by looking at the "play count" and "last played" columns in iTunes. I have songs that have played more than 10 times, and some songs that have never played, and I'm almost always on shuffle. I understand it begins shuffling anew each morning when my computer comes on, but still, it's clearly going to the same songs repeatedly.
posted by donnagirl at 3:08 PM on July 28, 2005

Well, that's a tidy answer, but easily proven wrong by looking at the "play count" and "last played" columns in iTunes. I have songs that have played more than 10 times, and some songs that have never played, and I'm almost always on shuffle.

You seem to be assuming that a random distribution should play all songs equally, which just isn't the case. Rather, the distribution of songs should roughly follow a Poisson Distribution. For example, if you have a playlist of 1000 songs, and you randomly select a song from it 1000 times, then nu = 1 and you can expect to have roughly:

• 368 songs that have never been played
• 368 songs that have been played once
• 184 songs that have been played twice
• 61 songs that have been played three times
• 15 songs that have been played four times
• 3 songs that have been played five times

and about a 50-50 chance of getting a song played six times. In other words, you get a good deal more "clumpiness" than you'd expect.
posted by Johnny Assay at 3:36 PM on July 28, 2005

I made the mistake of rating just a few of my mostest favoritest songs... and now I hate them. I have been working on rating my entire library and it seems to be shuffling better. But bonaldi is right - it's too mathematically random. I have had the same song play twice in a row, and often twice in 15 minutes.

And I am probably imagining this, but iTunes seems to like artists that I have a lot of songs from over those that I have just one song from. I hear DMB all day, while my one-hit wonders idle.
posted by clh at 3:43 PM on July 28, 2005

Rev. Syung Myung Me: How many total songs do you have in your library? Did you rate them as you add songs, or did you have to spend a big chunk of time going through and rating things?

Also - do you use this system on an iPod? Does live updating work on the iPod, or will the playlist remain static once you sync with iTunes?

In my library, 14,139 (although I also have a massive non-smart playlist with stuff like radio shows and whatnot pulled out, so it's basically just songs, which is 13,462 songs). I rate them as I add songs, and I also actually just finished last weekend rating all of the non-rated ones. So right now, I think I've got maybe 70 non-rated ones, just because I just added a bunch that I need to start dropping in to them. So, it does take a while, but to cheat, you can tend to bulk-rate. Like if you've got a bunch of stuff by one artist you haven't heard, but you typically rate their stuff 4 songs, just mark all of them 4 stars, and then you can always modify ratings as they come up in Shuffle)

Unfortunately, I don't have an iPod of any flavor (though if someone wants to remedy that, like, for free, I'd gladly accept...), so I don't know how it works with that. The help file for iTunes didn't really seem to clarify, but it looks like what you would do is hook in your iPod, select the @Radio Puppy (to use my case) playlist and tell it to Auto-Fill from that playlist; apparently, too, it will mark the songs that are transferred and those that aren't, so perhaps you can set up a rule in your smart playlists to not include songs that have been transferred over? This is just a guess, though, since I've never messed around with an iPod in this sense.

(Also, with limited-track smart playlists, you can always delete the contents of them -- by which I mean the "2 star song/3 star song/etc" ones, not "@Radio Puppy" -- and get a whole new selection of songs that fit whichever criteria you've set. This won't work on @Radio Puppy, since it's all of the songs from those playlists -- not picking-and-chosing songs -- so basically, it's like drawing 2 marbles from a sock that has 2 marbles in it -- no matter how many times you put shake up those marbles, you'll always draw the same 2.)
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 4:03 PM on July 28, 2005

And I am probably imagining this, but iTunes seems to like artists that I have a lot of songs from over those that I have just one song from.

No, probably not, since it is likely to pick randomly by song, rather than by artist. If you have 99 songs by the Beatles and one by Britney Spears, you're going to get the Beatles 99% of the time.

I have a smart playlist for non-Books/Spoken, 3* or unrated, and Party Shuffle draws off of that. So when I get stuff I don't want to come up in Party Shuffle, I just rate it 2*. If I don't like the rate at which things pop up, star rating is a pretty good way to tweak it.
posted by grouse at 4:17 PM on July 28, 2005

unless you're dead-set on using iTunes, I suggest using longplayer instead.
posted by mcsweetie at 4:23 PM on July 28, 2005

What they should have done is make it so that the same artist won't be played within a few hours, or tracks from the same album won't be played until at least 80% of other albums have been played.

Maybe they should include some options for that, but it's a hard problem to solve in general. In grouse's Beatles/Britney example, if you followed the artist rule would it just stop playing after it had played one Beatles track and one Britney track? Or would it do the best it could to avoid playing the same artists back to back, for example play a Beatles song, try to avoid playing a Beatles song immediately and play the only Britney song, play a Beatles song, play the only Britney song...?

I much prefer that they're *not* trying to skew the randomness (or that they let me turn off any skewing options), so that I can skew it myself. My Party Shuffle playlist combines a 200 song "highly rated, least recently played" smart playlist with a 200 song "unrated, most recently played" smart playlist. That way I hear every song I like before I hear any of them a second time, and have a motivation to rate tracks so I stop hearing them over and over.
posted by aneel at 4:53 PM on July 28, 2005