So Steven Levy has written an article – nay a book – about how the random shuffle play on iPods doesn’t seem very random.
I was a little peeved reading this, as I wrote an entry in this blog over 3 years ago on the same subject.
Think I nailed the problem there and then – that when we want random, we don’t really want random. Random could mean getting all the tracks from Demon Days in order. Or reverse order. Or an entire day of songs by The Fall. Random almost certainly does not mean “don’t play 2 songs by the same artist for at least 2 hours”, and yet that’s what most people want. Hence the new ‘less random is more random’ features in iTunes.
Yeah, thanks a lot Giles. I was just barely managing to make myself concentrate on writing the php to create a valid CURL handle to request a secure session token from Google’s amazingly crufty AuthSub. My concentration slipped for a microsecond while trying to figure out how to best to create my ‘nonce: a random 64-bit, unsigned number encoded as an ASCII string in decimal ‘ and I noticed that there was a new blog entry to read. Fifteen minutes later and I’m half-way through an article about randomness in iPods instead! And the supper’s still not cooked.