meditations on the "shuffle songs" function of an ipod.

[gleamingkey]

again i find myself at my desk downstairs at the hilltop office. and again, i’m wasting time, only this time, i’m listening to my ipod on shuffle. i have been doing so for the past half hour or so, part of which was during my lunch break. while on the later portion of this lunch break, it occurred to me how typically 21st-Century the concept of

Comments

do not read this, it's too dorky to handle

[broknjayd]

i've heard (though i'm not sure) that ipods on random tend towards songs with a higher playcount. the thinking would be that if the song has a higher play count, you listen to it more because you like it more and will therefore be happier (everything in computer world is about making people happier, i've discovered this summer). on that same thinking, if you listen to one song on an album frequently then you probably listen to another song on that album just as frequently so they would both come up in frequent rotation.

on the other hand, if it was truly random (which computers are almost perfectly capable of doing, do a slight fault) then it makes as much sense for the next song on the album to appear (in order) then for a completely different song to appear. to your ipod, all of the songs look just as random. think about it this way: if you're randomly picking 2 numbers between 1 and 10, picking 1 and 2 is just as random as 3 and 7. the situation are equally likely, it's just coincidental to YOU because you have assigned meaning to the order of those numbers (or to those songs). in ipod world, songs are just numbers to pick from.

(you know that it can't be TOTALLY random because i don't think ipods ever play the same song twice in a row...that would be a little tweak that someone wrote in because it would be unexpected behavior and the last thing people want is something unexpected. still, it's just a number! if it depended on the number that appeared before it, it wouldn't be 'random').

conclusion:

'random' in English means 'with no apparent ordering or relevancy'

but to your ipod, all numbers are random. the ordering you see in the album is something you are imposing!

conclusion 2:

interning at microsoft is seeping into my brain in a bad way.

Re: do not read this, it's too dorky to handle

[meloraborealis]

i actually thought about all that before i wrote, i mean not in those terms because i'm not that smart, but i am definitely aware of that whole program tweaking idea. but i checked my settings and you can set it to make it more likely to play songs by the same artist or from the same album. it's called smart shuffle, but the range is "more likely" - "random" - "less likely". i have it set to random because i would assume that it's the only one that's actually randomized. but its not. and now my head hurts, and i dont really think i understand the shuffle function any better. damn. weed.

Re: do not read this, it's too dorky to handle

[gleamingkey]

i think lilia's onto something; now that she mentions it, it DOES seem like the ipod isn't TRULY random in its shuffling...but even if it ISN'T totally random [it takes your entire library, ordered by song, and reorders it, making a playlist, so you never hear the same song twice], it's still random enough that i often hear at least one song on random that i had forgotten about, or not listened to in hella long.

as for the smart shuffle, it's cool and uncool at the same time. the reason it's cool is because, with it on, you are less likely to hear two songs by the same artist back to back. but it's uncool because if you're listening to a playlist with two or three albums, it will systematically play one track from A, one from C, one from B, one from A, one from B, one from C....so that you get this obnoxious back-and-forth feel that recalls the frenzy of not being able to select one album.

i like this conversation. good comments, girls!

heart
patrick