Topic: question about random play

[itazura]

I've been using XMPlay as my default player for a few weeks now...thank you for making such an efficient and small player that doesn't wreak havoc on system memory!  

I have a very vague question regarding random playback.  I have a collection of 400-500 albums in mp3 format and I like to set XMPlay to randomly play back from the 7000+ tracks in question.  But often the playback just doesn't seem so random.  I'm afraid I have no way to objectively qualify that statement, but in the course of a few hours, for instance, I'll often hear tracks from the same few albums multiple times.  Other albums I've never heard come up in weeks of listening.  

I'll admit that this could just be dumb luck or a biased perception on my part, but could you shed some light on just how random the random playback is and whether it should be capable of coping with large collections of files without losing its...err...randomness?  I'd also be interested in knowing if anyone else who uses random play has had a similar experience (...perception of not-so-random playback).

Just curious....

Thanks,
itazura

[guest]

What about option storing automatically in playlist already played tracks for next playlist's running (for example as tracks set to "skip")?

[itazura]

ahh, I probably wasn't so clear there.  The identical tracks do not repeat themselves...that is well-handled by XMPlay...but a bunch of tracks from a relatively small number of albums -- or even harder to state objectively, a large number of tracks from a group of albums added to the collection during a particular time period (say, the last three days) -- will often play in something close to succession while other albums or areas of my collection seem to get skipped over again and again.

Again, this is all hard to state objectively.  Winamp always had the same problem for me, and was a memory-hog to boot.  dBPowerAmp (which I otherwise do not like) seems to have the closest to truly random playback among the players I've tried.

itazura

[Vesh]

Yeah, I've noticed this too and think I understand what you're saying. It's like - in terms of data sampling (as in survey information) - it's not sampling evenly across the overall data. It's grabbing tracks from too tight an area in the playlist.

Lemme try to put it visually because I dont know that my words are getting there. Say the white space is a playlist and the black lines are the first however-many songs that are played:

It's like this [what it seems like it's doing]:



Vs. this [what it should be doing]:



Anyway, like you, at times I can have some pretty gigantic playlists goin on and the uneven randomness of the random play is something that keeps me from using the feature. I wish there was something to do about that.

Ian?

[itazura]

Vesh, your images do much better than my words.  That's precisely what I was trying to describe....

[Olego]

Heh, I've been bugging Ian about this for quite a long time.  I still believe that Random is not truly Random, but he always says that it's random for him.  Maybe it's not being randomised?  Maybe it's only 8 bit random?  *shrug*~Olego~