Fuze Shuffle Thoughts

[face]

There have been a lot of discussions of the Shuffle functionality on the Fuze. My observations are:

1. During Play All it seems to do fairly well.
2. Genres it does fairly
3. Play Lists - it does horrible. Seems to focus on small subset of albums/artist.

While the 1st two will focus some on the same artist/album, the Play List is really bad.

Shuffling Play All does not really work for me as if I do not Christmas music playing all year long. If I have show music, such as Phantom of the Opera, I don't want it shuffled in either. Thus comes the idea of creating of Play List so I can dump what I want shuffled in the list. Sadly, it does not shuffle well.

Genres shuffle fairly well but you can not count on genres being what you would expect and while that can be fixed, it can be a pain.

HMMMMM, maybe I will create a Genres called SHUFFLE!!!!

[CrowdAds]

[solomonella]

...rockbox

[JK98]

It seems like making the shuffle work well should be an easy thing to do on a device with a real time clock simply by using the thousandths of a xecond counter as an input to a random number generating algorithm. On devides without a real time clock it would seem much more difficult to generate numbers that are truly random.

[Marvin the Martian]

Originally Posted by solomonella

...rockbox

+1

[Enigmatic]

Originally Posted by JK98

It seems like making the shuffle work well should be an easy thing to do on a device with a real time clock simply by using the thousandths of a xecond counter as an input to a random number generating algorithm.

Producing a good random-number generator is definitely not easy. If it was, then there would be no problems with SanDisk and Samsung MP3 players playing back songs randomly. I suspect the developers did not test their generators carefully. I think we should also make a distinction between playing back songs randomly and playing back songs in shuffle mode.