randomly kept awake

in keeping with sleep related blog entries, i had a thought that refused to let me sleep until it was fully fledged! and then i went to bed. but, here it is after some fresh sleep.

i dont know why, but it was about the "random shuffle" feature on most media players, on pc's, on mp3 players, whatever. i like using random on media players quite a lot.

my opinion is, i don't really trust it to be all that random. what do i mean? well ok, theres some artists that take up a disproportionately large amount of space on my media library in comparison to others (switchfoot take up 67 tracks all by themselves, relient k 59), and there are other artists where i have just one or two of their songs (like public enemy - bring the noiiiiise). furthermore, theres some artists where one album may take up about 20 tracks (manu chao's esperanza), and ep's that might be made up of just 5 or 6 (iron & wine's woman king). so what happens when the whole library is played on random? i mostly get to hear the artists or albums that have the most tracks - because of their sheer numbers, they have a higher probability of being chosen at random. that means i barely get to hear the little one-offs at all, or bands that have small albums. hearing the same thing? not very random in my eyes, even if the means of generating it is strictly 'random'.

i thought it'd be cool if media players made up a function where it takes a list of all the artists in the library (no repetitions), and randomises that list - then probability of an arist being repeated is considerably less, and not dependent on how many songs of theirs are in the library. then once the artists are randomised, and the time's come to play a song of theirs, the next tier would be to pick a song of that artist at random.

so, in summary, a two step randomisation, choosing;-

-an artist at random from a list of all artists (no repetitions)
-a song at random from the random artist


from this, i imagine youd get to hear all those strange songs that you thought youd forgot or deleted but hey they just werent chosen on random before.