Shuffle not random enough

[Khaine]

When playing an album from the library using shuffle. The first song in the album is always played first. When the shuffle checkbox is selected a random song should be selected to be played first, not the first song in the list.

[Borden Rhodes (dominussuus-deactivatedaccount)]

Further to this (and perhaps worthy of its own bug report) the randomiser isn't very random. When I put shuffle on and start playing songs, I find that I hear the same handful of songs several times (such as song A, then B, then C, then A, then D, then B, etc...) whilst others never get played.

[Cameron Matheson (cameron-matheson)]

I agree that the random isn't very random... w/ an unrated-collection I keep hearing the same few songs over and over again (several hundred (out of about 1200 songs)) have never been played.

[eoinsmith001 (eoinsmith001)]

Yes, I've got over 1600 songs in the library, yet I've heard Eleanor Rigby twice in the last 2 hours, and have got 3 songs from 1 Bruce Springsteen album. And 3 songs from Melon Collie... including Lily twice. This is just today, since lunchtime!

[Borden Rhodes (dominussuus-deactivatedaccount)]

Is anyone doing anything about this? I stopped using GNOME years ago so I don't know whether this bug has been fixed or not... or whether Rhythmbox is even part of GNOME still.

[dekaru (sly-dekar)]

This bug hasn't been fixed yet. I just got the same song to play thrice. This should be avoided.

There should also the option to play higher rated songs more often.

[Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage . I have classified this bug as a bug in rhythmbox.
For future reference you might be interested to know that a lot of applications have bug reporting functionality built in to them. This can be accessed via the Report a Problem option in the Help menu for the application with which you are having an issue. You can learn more about this feature at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Since this is a feature request, it should be reported upstream where the developers can handle it. For forwarding instructions have a look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME.

[Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

dekaru wrote:
>> There should also the option to play higher rated songs more often.
Please open a seperate bug for this request. Thanks.

[Hew (hew)]

The comments in this bug related to the shuffle function not being random enough, but the bug as originally described was that the first song in a playlist was always chosen when starting playback. This bug was filed 3 years ago. I have tested rhythmbox on Jaunty and this bug is no longer present, so this report is being closed.

As for the comments about how random the shuffle function is, please make sure you have the gconf key /apps/rhythmbox/state/play_order set to shuffle, which means all songs are equally likely to be selected. If this is the case and you still experience the issue, and it's statistically greater than what could be called a coincidence, please open a new bug report on the issue. Thanks for your help.

[Kẏra (thekyriarchy)]

Has anybody filed a bug report for shuffle randomness? I have over 14,000 songs in my library and shuffle always plays the same damn songs!

[firstperson (ident)]

My experience of the shuffle function when playing from a library of several hundred songs is that it is not random. I don't have any statistical proof of this (It could be argued that any sequence of tracks is possible). Does the algorithm have any constraints, such as limiting the total number of times any one track may be played, that cause it to deviate from randomness?
  (BTW it is now repeating a track that it played half an hour ago!!!)