Media Player 9 shuffling

16 Comments

• I agree with the WinAmp statement. I still use WinAmp 2.8 as my mp3 player (Windows Media Player is great for some things but I don't think playing music is one of them). WinAmp 3.0 has some cool new features but the features I require aren't there, so I uninstalled it after about 30 minutes of heartache and headache.
  

• Sticking to Winamp 2.8 as well. Still the best, and nothing more required!
  
  
  Media Player is bloated, and Winamp 3 is buggy and they exchanged the good features with useless ones.
  

• Yep, it really sucks... came here after a web search to see if anyone else had noticed. It's not hard to do random numbers... I presume it's a bug from a side effect to stop it repeating tracks if you're just shuffling one CD, but as I have 2200+ WMAs it seems to play about 10% over again - got the same sequence coming up twice in one morning
  

• I feel like if I click on songs that aren't playing, they'll quickly find their way to the top of the shuffle algorithm as well....odd, but somewhat useful at the same time.
  

• You can get round the Media Player problem by selecting All Music (from your library) and then going to the NOW PLAYING tab. Then at the bottom of the screen (at the right hand side) you will find a button called select playlist options. From this choose sort and select RANDOMISE.
  
  
  
  You are quite right SHUFFLE SUX - but RANDOMISE is great.
  
  
  
  Hope that helps,
  
  Gordon (from London)
  

• Thanks for the tip, Gordon... not entirely intuitive, the way it does that, but it's nice to now know it's possible.
  

• thank you Gordon!!!
  

• Man, you guys half to stop living in the PAST. Windows Media Player 11 and its shuffle algorithm are the BOMB.
  

• I agree with Jakers Cakers. I actually googled up "windows media player shuffle algorithm" because i've been wondering for the last few days how the hell media player 11 randomly plays good music. all of my music is good though, but this sounds almost harmonically mixed at times. its very good, and besides floola, i don't use any other player.
  

• ok, windows media player 11 may be playing mostly good music, but when you have past 2000 good songs, you dont want to be listening to only 200 good songs.. gets repetitive! I think it still has the bugs of windows mediaplayer 9!
  

• The windows media player 11 is not better at all. I got around 1 500 songs (120 hours) of music, and it plays the same songs over and over. I noticed the "randomise" too myself few days ago, but I never remember to do that. If somebody would make a plugin to make the algorithm better...
  

• Okay, these algorithms suck, and there seems to be no difference between random and shuffle.
  
  If something is "random" you can get the same song out of, say, 10, over and over again. It selects randomly from the whole list. Ever flipped a coin five times and got heads every time? Believe me, you never want random, you want what shuffle *should* be.
  
  "Shuffle" doesn't work any differently, but it should. Say I shuffle a deck of cards, then deal just one--the ace of spades. The next card I deal can't be that ace, can it? The ace has been eliminated from the list, and you have just 51 selections left. So if you had 52 songs, and listened to 52 songs, you would hear them all, shuffled, and none would repeat. Then it could either be programmed to start over again, or stop playing.
  
  But the designers don't seem to understand any difference between these two things. All the programs just do random. It is annoying, to say the least.
  
  If *I* had 2000 good songs, I'd want to hear them all before hearing the same one three times, wouldn't I?
  
  

• @Lawrence
  
  Right on the money!
  

• I had to select all music, right click, save as new playlist, then play that list, randomize and shuffle.
  
  WMP still hanging up on me a lot though. I suspect it is because a lot of my music are old ripped mp3s and wmp is trying to find and apply info.
  
  The piece of junk wont let me work offline independantly with WMP while working online with IE. I will now find another music management program that just manages freaking music and leaves eveything else well enough alone.
  

• agree with comments above - V11 still has this issue. I think it might use the song rating to help it pick your favourite tracks. Problem is I have never set these, and always listen on shuffle. So I think if shuffle happens to choose a track a few times it increases the rating, and is them more likely to pick that track in the future, making the rating even higher. Really poor they have not sorted this out, it is probably one of the most straight forward things for a programmer to do, they have had an OK random function in excel for ever, not sure why they didn't use this instead of trying to get fancy (and failing in the most basic task).
  

• I actually love the WMP shuffle. When ever I have difficulty choosing a song to listen to, I just turn shuffle on and it rarely disappoints me. It seems somehow WMP mimics your taste in its' shuffle algorithm. Lovin' it. :D
  
  ps: If you want "true" shuffle, MPlayer for linux is where you'll want to go.