The Great Ipod Shuffle Conspiracy

Ok, any of us that are Itunes or Ipod users know the story – how on some days, the shuffle software seems to take a shine to a particular artist. I’ve got 7,000 tracks in my Ipod by some shocking amount of acts – so why do I get four songs by the Pixies in less than two hours? Steven Levy investigates – is the shuffle really random?

Steven Levy really liked Steely Dan, but so too, it seemed, did his iPod. Like a lot of people, he began to wonder about its shuffle – was the random function really random or a result of dirty tricks, blunders… or even telepathy?

I’m given to wonder though – do users of other mp3 players – Iriver, etc – have similar experiences?
The Guardian/Observer: Oh no, not Steely Dan again by Steven Levy»

daev
Chief Bottle Washer at Blather
Writer, photographer, environmental campaigner and "known troublemaker" Dave Walsh is the founder of Blather.net, described both as "possibly the most arrogant and depraved website to be found either side of the majestic Shannon River", and "the nicest website circulating in Ireland". Half Irishman, half-bicycle. He lives in southern Irish city of Barcelona.

8 comments

  1. must get one of those portable thingy someday, just picked up a 500GB external drive for ripping cds to, looking forward to kicking it off. speaking of which, where are we with the share space, commander in chief?

  2. well now. this *is* freaky. i slapped a steely dan greatest hits on my i-pod two weeks ago and it hasn’t stopped playing it since.

  3. Thank you for your query regarding sharespace. Your request is currently 10089th in the queue. Please bear with us. Your call *is* important to us.

  4. I have an iPod nano and I often get 2 or 3 songs in a row by the same artist when I’m on shuffle. However, it only happens with artists of which I have 6 or less songs stored. It’s most bizarre but I don’t know enough about probability theory to understand why this happens.

  5. it’s the dildo in Naked Lunch, as well as being one of the worst bands in human history that I for one would NEVER load onto itunes, eugh, I deserve that pint now

  6. “Thank you for your query regarding sharespace. Your request is currently 10089th in the queue. Please bear with us. Your call *is* important to us.”
    did you get a job with netriplex?

  7. ‘thankyou for calling the blather broadcasting corporation. your call means absolutely fuck-all to us and is currently ranked 8,947th in a queue which will be answered sometime in the year 2017 by a faeces-throwing chimp. in the meantime, we don’t thank you for your patience and suggest that if you have a problem with this that you fuck off out of it and call the ryanair hotline’

Comments are closed.