blog@cliffdweller

Apple's new slogan for their new iPod is particularly ironic considering the "shuffle" or "random" features in their iTunes/iPods is so limited.

I mean, on my iTunes, I have 6795 tracks. According to the timer thingy at the bottom of the window, that means I have 21 days, 19 hours, 2 minutes and 24 seconds of continuous non-stop music if I played it all straight through. Wow. I guess encoding MP3s for 5 years can really add up (and there are still more CDs in the collection that I've yet to rip).

Now, why complain about the "shuffle"? In the early days of CD players, "random play" like on the Pioneer decks meant that any song on the CD (or CDs in the multidisk models) could be next. Sometimes it could even play the same track twice in a row. That's random for you.

Shuffle, on the otherhand, as deployed by the Sony folk, meant that the cd player knew how many tracks there were going in, shuffled them like a deck of cards into a one time playlist and then played them in that order. While "shuffle" employed "random", it had a subtle difference. It would play every song available until they had all been played once before it played any song a second time.

So skip ahead a few years and enter iTunes (and then iPod with the same crappy shuffle algorithms). In fact, let's blow right past all the early iTunes and land on the one that is the current one as of 1/1/05: iTunes 4.7 (I tie it to that one because Steve Jobs' keynote is happening right this second and they could introduce new versions of the popular program today).

In my collection of 6795 songs, I have 1036 artists, spanning 950 individual albums. sweet. When I choose the main library for the source of my music and then click on "Shuffle by Song" it does a pretty good job of picking random tracks, and not repeating them. HOWEVER, it doesn't appear to pick from the entire list, it appears to use a subset of the list.

Now, that subset changes over time, but it's like it chooses random tunes from 10 albums for a while and then moves onto another 10 albums.

Consider this: today, since 7:30 am, it has played 29 songs: 1 by Styx, 1 by Sparks, 1 by Saga, 2 by Orchestral Manouvres in the Dark, 1 by Olivia Newton-John, 2 by the Moody Blues; 4 by the Human League; 1 each by Gordon Lightfoot, Dolly Parton, Berlin, Alphaville, Alan Parsons Project and 2 by ABBA. Oh, I left out one artist. It's played 10 by James Blundell and 5 of those came from a single album. Both ABBA tunes are from one album, and both OMD tunes are from one album.

Hello? do you even know who James Blundell is? Apparently iTunes does and it really favors him this morning. Not that I'm complaining, I like him too - he's an Australian Folk/Country singer and he's really hot.

So in "Shuffle Play" this morning, iTunes has played 29 tracks, from 19 albums. I'm not a statistic's guy, but that seems pretty shoddy to me. Especially when there are 950 albums to choose from.

Of course, for all my whining, iTunes is still the best solution out there. So I guess I'm only complaining a little bit.

Life is Random. So's my Blog.