this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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Skipping along, missing most of the beats... (lemmy.ca)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 40 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

Just because someone skips a track doesn't mean that track was wrong for that playlist. It just means the time was wrong for that track. The mood.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed; but "Shuffle" used to be a good thing! Now; it frequently just isn't good at it's job. There's no control over the "Randomness" of the shuffle anymore, and there's no way to turn off any "Algorithm" that promises it can pick the next song better than random shuffling can.

Sometimes that experience of a truly random or an algorithmic shuffle is good; and sometimes it delivers bad options, and being able to say "Nah, I'm just not into this track today, NEXT!" is something I regard as a fundamental right, and something that you too, should do. Skips shouldn't be precious actions. Your mental heath shouldn't be impacted by an unlucky shuffle, nor should your mood.

Music is a deep, and almost primal form of expression; and it can express many things. Sooo...Being able to skip the emotional equivalent of a ๐Ÿ’ฉ pile of poo ๐Ÿ’ฉ is actually pretty important...even if it doesn't ๐ŸŒน always (metaphorically) smell ๐ŸŒธ like poo to you all the time.

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

Bro I'm fine with emojis but your placement choice is whack

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Random shuffle really wants me to listen to a specific group of songs on revanced music.

Doesnt matter if I'm listening to rock, musicals, soundtracks, or medieval versions of "pumped up kicks", it always brings me back to a handful of pop songs after one or two songs.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

I remember when I used spotify and it just kept insisting on putting and seemingly prioritizing popular pop songs in its generated playlists if I ever liked just one or two. Even in my own playlist if prioritized them a lot over the songs I did hear over and over again. And like, why??

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I was only vaguely aware of the algorithm on Spotify and that not being allowed to skip very often is a thing there, and man, this comment read like a completely deranged monologue from some sort of alternative, dystopian reality.

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

algorithm... not being able to skip... Glad I went back to a dedicated mp3 player.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

OOTL here, Spotify hasnt done that for me yet.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I think, it's only in the free version of Spotify. So, if you're paying for Spotify Premium, you wouldn't have that problem.

But I mean, I'm obviously completely out of the Spotify loop, so definitely take that one with a grain of salt...

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

Image

  • 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).

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 39 points 11 months ago (3 children)

On some days listening to a whole album start to finish just hits different

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's what I do most of the time. I have never even created a playlist for myself, I like the the coherent style of an album more.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Same, my girlfriend doesn't get it as she's the "all your songs on shuffle" kind of person

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Yeah it's albums like Neverbloom by Make them Suffer, which have songs that are great on their own, but are even better as one whole artpiece together.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Is legit.

But, you kinda have to do one playthrough like that. You can have the playlist perfect in theory, but until you listen to it all the way through, you can't know that you got things the way you really want them. Quick skipping through is the best way to do that with the ability to keep track of what your impressions of the playlist are, rather than just vibing to single songs and missing the overall flow.

It's absurd absurd how much thought I've put into playlist creation and management lol.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I just put everything in a single list and shuffle all

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Yes, even notification sounds. No skips.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Not sure, what kind of notification sounds you have that you'd need to skip to the end of them. A foghorn?

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

We as a species clearly do not possess the technical acumen to randomize alert sounds. Be realistic, this is a Lemmy, sir/madam/othergender!

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I prefer to create dozens of playlists with between one and three songs. Trust me, there is a ton of overlap too.