I am fond of a partial shuffle algorithm I wrote in Bash for my music playlists that often preserves neighbors of the input list in the output list.
Blue: input sequence.
Red: complete shuffle.
Green: partial shuffle.
The result is like skipping through my media library in order but occasionally randomly enabling shuffle to jump to a new place. Since the input list clumps albums together and since albums often have a similar vibe, if I want several similar songs of a particular feel to play one after another, I just have to manually advance through the outputted playlist until I hit a song that has what I’m looking for; then I can let the playlist continue automatically since each subsequent song is likely to be similar to the previous song (until another random jump occurs).
Nice. Once upon a time Winamp had a functional preferences slider that controlled the “Shuffle Morph Rate” and I can imagine it likely used a similar algorithm to shuffle.
I only wish this existed in more software in general…and that music players would let you select what method the randomization is achieved with.
I am fond of a partial shuffle algorithm I wrote in Bash for my music playlists that often preserves neighbors of the input list in the output list.
The result is like skipping through my media library in order but occasionally randomly enabling shuffle to jump to a new place. Since the input list clumps albums together and since albums often have a similar vibe, if I want several similar songs of a particular feel to play one after another, I just have to manually advance through the outputted playlist until I hit a song that has what I’m looking for; then I can let the playlist continue automatically since each subsequent song is likely to be similar to the previous song (until another random jump occurs).
Nice. Once upon a time Winamp had a functional preferences slider that controlled the “Shuffle Morph Rate” and I can imagine it likely used a similar algorithm to shuffle.
I only wish this existed in more software in general…and that music players would let you select what method the randomization is achieved with.