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Shuffle

Posted on: Raduga (English)

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Chuck Conrad

2007-07-24 17:18:16

Shuffle

As I understand it, when Raduga “shuffles,” it uses an algorithm similar to shuffling cards in Blackjack. I’m not sure how that works out in relationship to most play lists. Could you elaborate a bit?

As an example, let’s say you had a 400 song play list. Where would the #10 song likely to be in the play list after one shuffle? How about two or more shuffles? It would be helpful to know a bit more about how this actually works to take full advantage of its capabilities.

It may be my imagination, but it seems like songs in the first half of our 400 song example tend to stay in the first half of the play list, and songs in the second half seem to gravitate towards the later numbers. Is this my imagination, or something mathematically provable?

Maybe we need a “super shuffle” every now and then to make sure that songs don’t repeat at more or less the same time of day. It would be handy to be able to divide the play list in half, thirds, or whatever, and cut and paste it in a different order. You can do that by opening the play list in Word Pad, doing your cut and paste and save it again as a Raduga play list, but that is awkward. It isn’t hard to really mess things up – been there, done that… It there a way to do that within Raduga, while the program is running?

Wolfgang Loch

2007-07-24 21:33:30

Re: Shuffle

The shuffle alorithm has been changed as of version 3.8.6. Before that the shuffle was purely random, i.e. the chances that song #10 will end up at any position within a 400 song list were equally 1:400 for each position.

The disadvantage of this aproach is that there is a chance of 1:400 that song #400 will end up at position #1 and therefore be played twice.

With the new algorithm the chance that the last song will end up on postion #1 is zero, provided a playlist lenght of 3 or more. The chances of the last song ending up in the first half are lower than ending up in the second half of the playlist. It is still possible for the last song to end up on position #2, but it's very unlikely.

If you really need the original algorithm, you could use the "Shuffle Playlist.js" script from the Raduga SDK samples. Or since the .alb playlist is a simple text file, you could shuffle the lines using a text editor, such as SuperEdi (select all, then choose Edit/Advanced/Shuffle).

Chuck Conrad

2007-07-26 04:48:47

Re: Shuffle

Thanks. That is helpful information.

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