I Tunes Shuffle...is it cleverer than you think?
 

i listen to music while i work from home, all day long, and i have i-tunes on shuffle for most of the day...and its sometimes very strange in its 'random' track selection...

i have over 6900 tracks on my machine at the moment and oddly today its just selected:

Futureshock - the Question (which is a remix of Underworld's Why Why Why)

then followed it up immediately

Underworld - Why Why Why (the long version)

its just like it thought, i'll select something similar to before, Matt won't mind, i'll do the thinking for him...very odd - i thought - hence my post...

i do have a lot of Underworld tracks on here, but the odds of this happening must be pretty long...

i wonder what's next...Why Why Why - by the Woodentops?

it keeps me happy with its randomness...unless my computer is now actually thinking... a la Skynet, in Terminator 2?

Re: I Tunes Shuffle...is it cleverer than you think?
 

scrap that - my computer is stupid...for some reason it followed this up with Castles in the Sky - Ian Van Dahl...just when i thought it was getting a brain...;)

Unless anyone of you can tenaciously link Why Why Why by Underworld to Ian Van Dahl...??

Re: I Tunes Shuffle...is it cleverer than you think?
 

you might like this recent slashdot-article which links to this analysis on the shuffle function of itunes.
i don't know if it's any good, but at least it's related :)

Re: I Tunes Shuffle...is it cleverer than you think?
 

very intersting, as dull as that seem be to some people, i find it very interesting (especially as i work in statitical type analysis..., and produce these kind of comparisson charts all day long) i just wouldn't have the time or inclination to analyse I-Tunes to that degree...

and as random as I-Tunes is, he is right in his asertion that you will likely see patterns, (if you want to) in anything

a professor talking on the radio the other week (when Liverpool won the European cup - and the co-incidental links to previous cup wins) suggested that it woulkd be more strange that co-incidences didn't occur in life than if they did,

on an unrelated note: apparently a room of 11 random people is all you need to get two people with the same birthday!!!

anyway, Random I-Tunes is still running and i have no ratings on my tracks, so its purely random, as far as i can tell...but i'll report back any anomolies....

Re: I Tunes Shuffle...is it cleverer than you think?
 

sorry, further off topic :o

aahh... i spent last week trying to make sense of things as chi^2 - tests, maximum-likihood functions, and so on... and - i don't like it :D

i think it's 23 people to raise the possibility to 0.5 ;)

Re: I Tunes Shuffle...is it cleverer than you think?
 

Shuffle in iTunes is bollocks. I remember ranting about it in #rtsr a while ago :)

Re: I Tunes Shuffle...is it cleverer than you think?
 

the Shuffle on iPod Shuffle's is worse.

Re: I Tunes Shuffle...is it cleverer than you think?
 

why why why would you have that turgid piece of pop-trance on your ipod in the first place... ;)

Re: I Tunes Shuffle...is it cleverer than you think?
 

Made me think of the movie Pi.. God I loved that film.
Made me want to learn more math, and that is just plain sick comming from me.. I actually started at a math intro course and did pretty well for about half a year. It's all lost now though.

But I've been thinking about the shuffle function as well. In WinAmp you can set a degree of how random you want it, but I think it selects worse and worse music the less random you make it, so I always keep mine at max. In fear of what it might play if I try the minimun, I have never tried it..

Re: I Tunes Shuffle...is it cleverer than you think?
 

Matt: Why Why Why do you have Castles in the Sky by Ian Van Dahl on your ipod? its utter _____