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Skipping along, missing most of the beats...
(lemmy.ca)
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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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Just because someone skips a track doesn't mean that track was wrong for that playlist. It just means the time was wrong for that track. The mood.
I don't know if anyone else has noticed; but "Shuffle" used to be a good thing! Now; it frequently just isn't good at it's job. There's no control over the "Randomness" of the shuffle anymore, and there's no way to turn off any "Algorithm" that promises it can pick the next song better than random shuffling can.
Sometimes that experience of a truly random or an algorithmic shuffle is good; and sometimes it delivers bad options, and being able to say "Nah, I'm just not into this track today, NEXT!" is something I regard as a fundamental right, and something that you too, should do. Skips shouldn't be precious actions. Your mental heath shouldn't be impacted by an unlucky shuffle, nor should your mood.
Music is a deep, and almost primal form of expression; and it can express many things. Sooo...Being able to skip the emotional equivalent of a ๐ฉ pile of poo ๐ฉ is actually pretty important...even if it doesn't ๐น always (metaphorically) smell ๐ธ like poo to you all the time.
I am fond of a partial shuffle algorithm I wrote in Bash for my music playlists that often preserves neighbors of the input list in the output list.
The result is like skipping through my media library in order but occasionally randomly enabling shuffle to jump to a new place. Since the input list clumps albums together and since albums often have a similar vibe, if I want several similar songs of a particular feel to play one after another, I just have to manually advance through the outputted playlist until I hit a song that has what I'm looking for; then I can let the playlist continue automatically since each subsequent song is likely to be similar to the previous song (until another random jump occurs).
Nice. Once upon a time Winamp had a functional preferences slider that controlled the "Shuffle Morph Rate" and I can imagine it likely used a similar algorithm to shuffle.
I only wish this existed in more software in general...and that music players would let you select what method the randomization is achieved with.