Friday, April 16, 2004
Wired News: Music Magic Found in the Shuffle : The world is cathcing up with me. I have long loved the experience of listening to music on shuffle. Long before online music, my 60-CD changer was often on full shuffle, and now it's almost exclusively how I listen to my portable player or my home library. In this article, Wired reports that I am not alone.
I am a little disappointed that author Leander Kahney didn't get into the issue of playing repeats in "shuffle" mode. Do shufflers prefer the chance to hear a song repeated, or would they prefer hearing every song at least once before cycling back through? I would rather hear no repeats, but I have run into people who disagree with me. Of course, I seem to get repeats more than statistically probable. Just my bad luck, I guess.
There is also the computational difficulty in generating a truly random number to waste time thinking about.
On second thought, since nobody else is really addressing this issue, I conclude that I am still ahead of the curve. Ha-haaa!
