I remember reading decades ago how music player devs would implement proper random playback and people would complain that it's not really random because it played the same song second time soon after the first. So the devs had to change it and make it less random...

You wouldn't even need to pop songs off the list, just shuffle, go through the playlist, shuffle then restart the playlist.

But the music app developers aren't trying to give you true randomness. They're using machine learning algorithms to try and guess what you really want.

Nothing does what it says it does anymore, everything's trying to second guess you. I hate it.

MPD will do that if you enable the 'consume' option.

Pretty sure that's how most of them work...?

It's a single function call to randomize the order of a list in most randomization libraries. The hardest part would be to persist this randomized list across program restarts, and it's not hard either.

def getNextShuffle(songs):
    return random.choice(songs)

Vs

def getNextShuffle(songs):
    randList = random.sample(songs, k=len(songs))
    for song in randList:
        yield song

Didn't include persisting it to storage for brevity. Only tricky part would be detecting when the source playlist changes and how to handle that. Personally I'd just append any new songs to a random position in the unplayed portion, while removal is obviously simple

This dude (famous for "do you guys not have phones?") actually has a pretty good YouTube series on interesting ways to tackle programming challenges. He's got one on randomness that I thought was pretty cool: https://youtu.be/2anY9ICA-Pg

Earlier this year I moved away from Youtube Music (was using the Morphe version of course). Ripped all my CDs to mp3 and FLACs. Got Fooyin on my computer and Foobar on my phone. Enjoying everything about it lol. Even the tedious task of ripping the music, setting the tags and filenames properly.

I also played around a bit with some music players that allowed for the good ol' WinAmp skins. Was very nostalgic. But after the nostalgia had burned off, Fooyin was the player of choice.

i've been using musicolet for that and i really like it.

I recommend Guayadeque, it has a smart mode that the next song played is similar to the one before it, so you never go from a slow, sad song to an upbeat one.

https://codeberg.org/thothix/guayadeque

I’m still pissed at Google for buying and then killing rather than integrating Songza. The only thing we kinda got from that was the moods radio in Google music.

Most ripping software I've used allow to throw in a link to a playlist. I started off by ripping a playlist or two from spotify and then adding albums as I buy or otherwise aquire them. Getting started is a bit of work, but once you get over that, the rest is easy. I now have about 238 hours of music on my phone and my desktop after a year or so of doing this.

They prioritize songs in your cache. That way they reduce their infrastructure costs. On Spotify at least clearing your cache can force it to give you something different.

I have periods of doing both. Last few months I've only listened to full albums. But I also do that with the "shuffle albums on playlist" setting. So I don't particularly choose which album to listen, most of the time I just accept what comes next, sometimes I skip album or two.

But I feel like I'm about to change to the "shuffle tracks on playlist" soon-ish.

yep. probably.
I cant do that. just using revanced or morphe and use ad-less youtube music.

Truly random 😅