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Can the iTunes shuffle function still pretend t...

In the days of yore we had "smart shuffle" with a slider in the prefences that would control "how [not quite] random" the playback of a list on "shuffle" would be. It never bothered me that this "shuffle" iteration wasn't honestly random, and I appreciated the fact that it did not repeat artists when playing songs back to back. Even if Bob Dylan is ten-percent of my libray, I would always here at least one song by a different artist in between Dylan songs. But this is no longer the case, and the loss of this functionality seems to have happened recently. Does anyone have any insight into this issue and, if so, how to regain the functionality that I—at least—have lost?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Without knowing which version of iTunes you're using its difficult to be detailed, but I have never experienced Shuffle mode not being "random" or repeating songs, albums or groupings unless I set shuffle to repeat.

Check your settings. Start with the Controls menu Shuffle and Repeat options.

This link will bring up a number of discussions about the "randomness" of iTunes shuffle feature. You may not remember anything about this topic since it wore itself out some years back (and the specific feature that I mentioned, the "slider bar" that adjusted the "smart shuffle," was phased out with the release of iTunes 8). Understand, I'm not using the word "random" loosely as a colloquial adjective: I mean random in its true mathematical sense. Computers use random number generators to mimic true and objective randomness. Moreover, iTunes shuffle has (to my knowledge) never been done the best that it could be directed to mimic random shuffling. iTunes, for instance, normally does its best to make sure that it doesn't play the same artist repeatedly. If the shuffle function of iTunes were truly random, we would hear far more back-to-back from the same songs and the same albums.

For more context, I'm not talking about "album" or "artist" shuffle. I appreciate the gesture, but I don't need help navigating drop-down windows: I know what's there (and what's not). Imagine a playlist that contains 10.4K songs from two hundred artists. When dealing with a playlist like this iTunes has always (at least since 2.x) done its best to shuffle without repeating, immediately after an artist or an album, the same artist or album, respectively. Since I began using iTunes, my hard drives and my music collection and my iTunes library have grown exponetially. Given the amount of songs and albums and artists in my library, it should be easier than ever for iTunes to choose shuffle patterns that don't mathematically mandate the repetition of an artist or an album directly after the same artist or album—which, in itself is another demonstration that iTunes merely mimics randomness. With over one thousand Bob Dylan songs (1,111 to be exact), the odds of iTunes not repeating Bob Dylan songs during a dozen years of use are pretty long, yeah? But that's what iTunes does: it constructions a sequence of songs that seem random to the human brain, doing its best to defy the patterns or order that humans wants to force upon sets of data.

The problem that I'm no experiencing is that iTunes is no longer performing in this fashion. iTunes is shuffling songs into lists that contain as many as three songs by the same artist in a row, and the artists that iTunes is repeating are not solely artists like Dylan who dominate my library. Artists with much smaller footprints are also prone to random playback that would be "abnormal" when juxtaposed against a statistical history of iTunes's "random shuffles" over the last dozen years.

So, again, my question is if anyone else has experienced this change in iTunes and its shuffle function.

I apologize for neglecting to mention my specs in the op: I'm running the penultimate MacBook Pro (15) model (mid 2015) that's completely optioned out, 10.12.5 (16F73), and 12.6.1.25. You may assume that everything on my machine is running the most current release but for that I'm not running anything still in beta.

Thanks for your reply.

I've been experiencing this for quite some time and resorted to Googling a possible fix to no avail. It's incredible, I have thousands of songs with various artists and "shuffle" only plays about 8-10 of those artists.

最後更新：2017-09-22 02:35:01

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