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Shuffle Play in Winamp
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cheesenip
Is it just me or does it seem like Winamp plays like the same songs over and over and some tracks don't even get played at all? I have a playlist of 300 mp3s and it seems that whenever i play winamp in shuffle mode, it plays the same mp3s over and over. It may just be my imagination, but is there a setting to change this or something? THanks.
jdat
yeah ....

I noticed that a long time ago ... and it's not really changed... best thing to do is hit randomize order ... that's better


problem is ... this is for the math heads.... randomness is an extremely complex application , that is hard to put into an app, and make actually valid......

concretely, how do you take something , and try to get "nothing" ( random order ) ???


winamp developpers need to go take some high level math classes
trancaholic
Trouble is that the computer is in its very essence a deterministic machine - that is, if you know what state it is in at a given time, you can in principle predict what state it will be in at a later time. Random numbers in computer applications are therefore not random. They are generated from a mathematical formula that takes a number (called the seed) as input and spews out some number in a given range as a result. This number is then usually used as the seed for the next number and so forth.

As for the first seed, usually you go for the reading of the internal clock, the position of the mouse pointer or some other non-deterministic attribute. The actual random number function can be anyone of a number of alternatives depending on what distribution you would want for the resulting numbers (e.g. should most of them lie in the upper half of the interval) - apparently winamp uses one with a non-uniform distribution and consequently the same numbers get picked often.

Hope that made sense.
jdat
quote:
Originally posted by trancaholic


Hope that made sense.



nah that was easy :p


~jdat goes and take a couple aspirine~ lol
Sand Leaper
Actually,there's a way to change this.If you go to preferences,you'll find a slider that says: Playlist Shuffle Morphing Rate or something like that.There you can change how much variation the shuffle play-function will make on the playlist.
TranceGiant
quote:
Originally posted by trancaholic
Trouble is that the computer is in its very essence a deterministic machine - that is, if you know what state it is in at a given time, you can in principle predict what state it will be in at a later time. Random numbers in computer applications are therefore not random. They are generated from a mathematical formula that takes a number (called the seed) as input and spews out some number in a given range as a result. This number is then usually used as the seed for the next number and so forth.

As for the first seed, usually you go for the reading of the internal clock, the position of the mouse pointer or some other non-deterministic attribute. The actual random number function can be anyone of a number of alternatives depending on what distribution you would want for the resulting numbers (e.g. should most of them lie in the upper half of the interval) - apparently winamp uses one with a non-uniform distribution and consequently the same numbers get picked often.

Hope that made sense.


:eyes: :eek: :eyes:
Fraggle
heh, ya trancaholic about explained it all

...i read somewhere that computers have a random number generator as part of the cpu hardware, but dropping out of computing didn't teach me any more about that :D

either way, computers and random numbers are never a good combination...of course with large sample sizes they may be random enough, but in any application, with small sizes they usually appear biased or skewed :(

ya, i've noticed even with 700 hours of mp3s winamp still manages to play some tunes over and over again (even after closing winamp, reboots, whatever)...and that's with the morph rate at maximum :p

haven't tried the random list thing, just random play

Mail Man
While on the topic on winamp can some1 tell me the command to copy all the names of all my tracks in my playlist. thanks
Fraggle
duuno if there's a direct copy command...but one way to do it is to type CTRL+ALT+G

that will make a html page in ie with ur playlist...then u can copy from there
mentalbarter
Yes its true, i wrote the winamp program, and the shuffle is not entirely random, because what in this world is entirely random, everything is governed by crappy maths equations and like that, so basically its not random, its just kinda half random:D

Busy Child
I pretty sure there is a way to make shuffle mode more randomized.
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