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Did anybody measure how random the shuffle really is? (Say, make a short list of, say, 20 songs, two each from 10 albums. Calculate probabilty of songs from the same album appearing next to each other. Perform a large number of shuffles and count actual frequency of such pairs.) Didn't somebody do some kind of similar simulation a few years ago?
Yeah, here on the BBS, as mentioned, as well as in the FAQ here.
The discussion of how to create a "seems more random than actually random" shuffle is a good one. For example, deliberately spacing out the artists so they don't seem to play clusters.
I can think of some ways to create a shuffle mode where the artists and/or albums are spaced out evenly, but it has some problems. The main problem is that everything seems fine at the beginning of the shuffle, but as you get closer and closer to the end of the shuffle, the variation in track counts per artist starts to hurt you, and you can't help but get blocks of all the same artist. Also, artists who appear rarely on your player (for example, I have only two songs by Men at Work on my player) will appear near the beginning of every shuffle in that case.
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