I listen to the entire player database (over 2,500 tunes) shuffled most of the time and I get this kind of 'clumping' of artist/album all the time. I guess it's actually a clumping of FID rather than anything else so I suppose that if you were to load the tunes into the player in a staggered order (and I don't mean staggered by one or two tunes) you would reduce the occurrence of this particular 'feature'. I thought it was an accepted fact that this was a bug in the player software but reading the other posts it seems that some people don't get this happening to them. Odd, very odd indeed.