iTunes Random Isn’t Random?

Q: I like to listen to iTunes on shuffle….but I seem to be hearing a large amount of the same songs over and over, and then many don’t ever get played. I really like Pat Benetar but I’d love to hear some other stuff. What’s going on?

A: This is something a lot of people have run into with the “random” feature of iTunes. Sometimes it really does seem like iTunes has favorite artists (or even like it’s trying to torment you by playing all the songs from your least favorite artist at once!). I have a long answer for you, or you could just look to the end of today’s article for the quick way to “fix” this.

Why does this happen?

So…random. It’s a strange concept. Many people feel like the iTunes random play isn’t very random because a lot of people expect “random” to mean “uniformly distributed.” Let’s look at an example of uniform distribution vs. true random.

If you put 10 CDs in a bag, grab one, toss it aside, grab another, toss it aside, you’ll be pulling all the CDs out in a random order and you’re not going to grab the same one twice. The CDs are pulled out in a random order, but they are also uniformly distributed through your collection. Most people start out expecting an iTunes random order to work somewhat like this. (If you’re having Math class flash-backs, don’t worry, this is as deep as we’re going to go into the math!)

However, if you pull a CD out, toss it back in the bag, when you pull another CD out there’s a 1 in 10 chance that you’ll grab the SAME cd again. As you keep grabbing a CD and putting it back, odds are that you’ll grab some of the CDs several times and some of the CDs…never. That’s a true random sample. If you pull out tons and tons of songs, you’ll eventually reach something close to the uniform distribution mentioned above, but odds are pretty likely that you’re going to repeat some stuff in the process. Thus, it starts to sound to us like iTunes is beginning to favor Joanie Mitchell after it selects several of her songs close together.

When people listen to their iPods on shuffle, what they WANT to hear is all 10 (or however many songs they own) in a random order, preferably without repeating artists or albums too often. For example, you’d probably love to hear every song you own once without repeats, but also without repeating songs from the same artist or album too close together.

However, to figure out how to get a uniform distribution of all of your songs when you have to take songs, artists AND albums into effect is a tricky problem! How long should iTunes wait after playing the Beatles before it plays another Beatles song? If it waits TOO long, all that would be left is Beatles songs and then it can’t avoid playing several in a row, and then it wouldn’t seem random anymore…but if it tries to play a lot of Beatles early on to avoid this, you run into the same problem of playing a lot of Beatles clumped together. See how confusing it gets for the poor computer?

Apple’s initial technique was to just pull random songs blindly from the bag ‘o music and not care whether it was repeating a song, artist, or album you’ve heard recently - they were going for TRUE random, not what people expect random to sound like, so it does tend to randomly pull music from the same sources more often than we’d maybe like it to.

Apple’s Solution to Make Random More Random

A lot of people were irritated that iTunes seemed to love certain artists and play them a lot while ignoring others, so Apple added a “fix” to iTunes to prevent this perception. In iTunes, navigate the Edit menu to: Edit→Preferences. There you’ll find a tab called “Playback.” Under this tab is a slider called “Smart Shuffle” that ranges from “more likely to hear sequential songs from the same artist or album” to “random” to “less likely to hear sequential songs from the same artist or album.” You can tweak this setting to select how likely your iTunes shuffle is to play similar stuff close together when it’s shuffling.

Interestingly, this same option doesn’t seem to appear in any of the iPod menus.  So, you can control random in iTunes, but if you’re on the road with your iPod, it’s in control for now!