Tag: Shuffled Conspiracy

Shuffled Conspiracy Part 2

So I am not the only one who came up with this subject! I found an article by David Braue on the Australian version of  CNET.com in which he describes an experiment he did with iTunes. You can find the article here:

iTunes: Just how random is random?

The first four conclusions from his experiment were:

  • 20 playlists (10 of 25 songs, and 10 of 40 songs) were created from a pool of 100 iTunes Music Store sourced songs, and 20 additional playlists when the pool was expanded to 200 songs using CD-ripped songs. This provided a total of 1300 slots to be filled at random.
  • On average, one would expect each song to appear on 6.5 playlists.
  • Popular, top-50 singles were rotated onto our playlists far more frequently than would be expected. Some artists, having just one song in the iTunes Library, were played more often than the entire 5-song collections of other artists.
  • Artists and singles purchased through iTunes were played more frequently than those that were not.

So how about that one?

(Originally posted on my Last.fm journal)

Shuffled Conspiracy?

So I like to experiment. On a software level, that is. I have tried all kinds of media players on my computer for example. The regular ones, like Windows Media Player and Winamp. But also the less common ones like VLC Player, Foobar, Quintessential Player and MediaMonkey.

For audio files I am using MediaMonkey most of the time now. MediaMonkey excels in the library and categorising department. I think it is better and more user friendly than Windows Media Player, and especially better than WMP 10, which I really hate. I only use WMP for playing videos because it is fast and does what it should do: play a video when I want to, and that’s it.

Back to audio files now. I use Quintessential Player as an alternate audio player. I use it mainly to avoid scrobbling audio tracks to Last.fm if I don’t want that specific song (or songs) to be added to my profile. When I am rehearsing songs for my band for example, I don’t want to the songs that I play over and over again to be added to my profile. Hence the use of Quintessential Player (or QCD Player).

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