RH910 Shuffle play... WTF?

[FTS2090]

I was listening to my 1gb disc and i selected shuffle play... well it basically isnt much of a random playback as i would have liked... basically it follows the same order of songs!!

even if i pop the disc out and reinsert it, the unit does remember i want to listen to that disc on shuffle, but it is always the same order of songs!!, not random at all... is there a way around this?

[Damage]

I don't use shuffle play as much, but for the most part, the Random Number Generator isn't really random (nor does it actually generate a set of random numbers, but that's a long story). You can give this process a bit of a kick in the boot by shuffling your own playback when you start playing your disc.

[Asia]

I noticed that too....it's a step back from Sony.

that was a complain abotu old Sony MD devices, that anytime you wanna play shuffle, it just play the tracks in the same order and even 2 to 3 times one track even it hasn't played all tracks ones.

Sony engeneers solved that problem with Net-MD probably adding a new kind of equation that is renewed each time. But now with HI-MD this shuffle mode desapeared...weirdo

[raintheory]

I noticed a nice pattern on my nhf800 on random.

i started on track 2 and it sequentially went forward by multiplying the track number by 2 and skipping to that track next...

2

4

8

16

32

64

Then it went to 5. lol

[Damage]

This is a bit about the "Random Number Generator" in that they aren't really random at all. This is partly done as a debugging feature (if you need Random Numbers in your program, you can have a set "generated" before hand to make debugging easier). I'm guessing that the shuffle function uses very few (maybe 1 seed based on the disc ID perhaps) seed to do the random functions, and the result is the predictable shuffle.

Also, Shuffle isn't really too good for your unit and battery life, as the head moves back and forth. If nothing else, something like it will shorten battery life fairly noticably. It might use something akin to elevator sequence, move the head from right to left, then start over or something.

[pata2001]

I noticed that too....it's a step back from Sony.

that was a complain abotu old Sony MD devices, that anytime you wanna play shuffle, it just play the tracks in the same order and even 2 to 3 times one track even it hasn't played all tracks ones.

That means it's a "truer" random. Just think about it, for a "truer" randomizer, ALL tracks, even the ones you've listened to, have the same chance to be picked. So it might just pick the same track again, even before playing all available tracks.

I wished Sony can implement a "smart" shuffle, like what Apple did with iTunes and iPods. In iTunse, there is an option to adjust the degree of the shuffle's choice in picking songs from same artist/album or not.

[theblueraja]

Yeah, I noticed with my RH10 when I did shuffles it seemed to FAVOR a particular artist or certain select cuts... not as random as I had hoped - lol.