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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Tunes, a Hard Drive and (Just Maybe) a Brain

New York Times (free registration required): "Now that people are rigging up their iPods to stereos at home and in their cars, they may have to think twice about what they have casually added to their music library. Shuffle commands have been around since the dawn of the CD player. But the sheer quantity of music on an MP3 player like the iPod - and in its desktop application, iTunes - has enabled the function to take on an entirely new sense of scale and scope. It also heightens the risk that a long-forgotten favorite song will pop up, for better or for worse, in mixed company. There is an unintended consequence of the allure of Shuffle: it is causing iPod users to question whether their devices 'prefer' certain types of music ... iPod enthusiasts are throwing all manner of Shuffle conspiracy theories around on Internet message boards, ranging from the somewhat plausible to the absurd."

Just a thought, but maybe the shuffle software is poorly written. I've noticed this sort of thing on the iPod, but not on the Dell DJ, and I think it's a bit more nefarious than this article suggests: When you start shuffling music on the iPod, it seems to return to the same artist and even album again and again for some reason. So if you hear a song by one group, you'll hear another by the same group shortly, even though there are songs by hundreds of groups on the device. And it's happened on each of my three iPods. Which makes sense, because...

"Stan Ng, Apple Computer's director of iPod product marketing ... said that the technology behind the Shuffle function has remained the same since the first-generation iPod. He declined to reveal the algorithm used to generate randomness on Shuffle ... 'The funny thing about it is that it really is random,' he said. 'When you turn on Shuffle Songs, it creates a randomized list of all the music on your iPod without repeating a song.'"

[ Posted at 9:04 AM | Permalink ]