Skipping along, missing most of the beats...

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Just because someone skips a track doesn't mean that track was wrong for that playlist. It just means the time was wrong for that track. The mood.
I don't know if anyone else has noticed; but "Shuffle" used to be a good thing! Now; it frequently just isn't good at it's job. There's no control over the "Randomness" of the shuffle anymore, and there's no way to turn off any "Algorithm" that promises it can pick the next song better than random shuffling can.
Sometimes that experience of a truly random or an algorithmic shuffle is good; and sometimes it delivers bad options, and being able to say "Nah, I'm just not into this track today, NEXT!" is something I regard as a fundamental right, and something that you too, should do. Skips shouldn't be precious actions. Your mental heath shouldn't be impacted by an unlucky shuffle, nor should your mood.
Music is a deep, and almost primal form of expression; and it can express many things. Sooo...Being able to skip the emotional equivalent of a 💩 pile of poo 💩 is actually pretty important...even if it doesn't 🌹 always (metaphorically) smell 🌸 like poo to you all the time.
- Bro I'm fine with emojis but your placement choice is whack
- Random shuffle really wants me to listen to a specific group of songs on revanced music.
  Doesnt matter if I'm listening to rock, musicals, soundtracks, or medieval versions of "pumped up kicks", it always brings me back to a handful of pop songs after one or two songs.
  
  I remember when I used spotify and it just kept insisting on putting and seemingly prioritizing popular pop songs in its generated playlists if I ever liked just one or two. Even in my own playlist if prioritized them a lot over the songs I did hear over and over again. And like, why??
- I was only vaguely aware of the algorithm on Spotify and that not being allowed to skip very often is a thing there, and man, this comment read like a completely deranged monologue from some sort of alternative, dystopian reality.
  
  algorithm... not being able to skip... Glad I went back to a dedicated mp3 player.
  
  OOTL here, Spotify hasnt done that for me yet.
  
  I think, it's only in the free version of Spotify. So, if you're paying for Spotify Premium, you wouldn't have that problem.
  But I mean, I'm obviously completely out of the Spotify loop, so definitely take that one with a grain of salt...
- I am fond of a partial shuffle algorithm I wrote in Bash for my music playlists that often preserves neighbors of the input list in the output list.
  
  Blue: input sequence.
  Red: complete shuffle.
  Green: partial shuffle.
  The result is like skipping through my media library in order but occasionally randomly enabling shuffle to jump to a new place. Since the input list clumps albums together and since albums often have a similar vibe, if I want several similar songs of a particular feel to play one after another, I just have to manually advance through the outputted playlist until I hit a song that has what I'm looking for; then I can let the playlist continue automatically since each subsequent song is likely to be similar to the previous song (until another random jump occurs).
  
  Nice. Once upon a time Winamp had a functional preferences slider that controlled the "Shuffle Morph Rate" and I can imagine it likely used a similar algorithm to shuffle.
  I only wish this existed in more software in general...and that music players would let you select what method the randomization is achieved with.

20 comments