Ok, I touched on this in another thread but here's my take: I'm betting this is totally random. I admit that I had doubts in the beginning before I took over the program I work with now. I can’t get into specifics, but it basically does randomly picks from a fixed list of available items. Every time it selects it does a completely isolated selection, but I get calls every day from users complaining that it isn’t random (that it “favors” certain items). I have tested the program, examined the random number generator, and written lengthy papers to explain the behavior, and yet I still get the calls. The truth is that I can plug all of the numbers into an excel spreadsheet and every time the numbers that the users report are well within expectations. The problem is the perception of non-randomness, not the program. True randomness does not yield an even distribution, though that’s what we expect. If it did, however, that would be an indication that it isn’t in fact random.

Now my program is a little different than the Empeg and I can’t say for sure that the randomizer on the Empeg is accurate. All I know is that I still get calls at least once a week complaining, and during some parts of the month (when program usage is high) I’ll get them every day. So Empeg guys, I feel your pain.

One example I remember from this community is the same song title coming up three times in a row (3 different version of the same song). I don’t remember if this was alleging a problem or not, but I know we discussed the randomizer in that thread. If you think about it much, this clearly wasn’t the randomizer at fault. The reason? The randomizer certainly isn’t taking song title into account; in fact I believe that if the randomizer were broken the only information that would affect how often a song was selected would be the song “position” (ie where it resides in the “list” of songs). Since I believe this particular song was three cuts off of three different albums, clearly the randomizer wasn’t at fault, as the songs were not located right next to each other. The only correlation between the three songs was incidental to the randomizer, but we perceived a correlation.

The only thing I can say is that perhaps the randomizer could be “de-randomize” since it seems that’s the behavior we all want. I think, though, that that’s what the parameterized shuffles are for.