Show Editor Shuffle Option

[soflochristmas]

For several years now, I try to use the shuffle option for my musical sequences but it never works. I get one song played twice (or more) and some songs not played at all. Is this what the "shuffle" option does...randomly selects sequences...even if they are randomly selected twice or more. Or should it select any one sequence only once if the time to run the show is just exactly enough time to run each sequence once?

[coasterbp]

I agree. The shuffle should only happen after making through the entire show list first. THEN it should shuffle and start again. Much like an iPods' shuffle function.

-=coasterbp

[bob]

Yes, that's the way shuffle behaves. There are several different possible methods of shuffling -- I personally have had at least four different CD players/changers that shuffled in at least four different ways -- and different people prefer different ways, so I don't think there's really a way that it "should" do it.

The only "should" is that we (Light-O-Rama) should make different popular styles of shuffling available as options. Unfortunately, currently, we only support the one style (which is the style that I personally prefer, which is actually the reason it is how it is; sorry about that!).

Incidentally, by far the worst shuffling behavior that I have ever encountered is in my car CD changer. It's a ten CD changer, and shuffles in the following way:

If you tell it to shuffle a single disk, it will play the songs from that disk without repeating any until it has played them all, but the first four songs it plays will be (in some random order) the first song on the disk, the last song on the disk, and the two songs closest to the middle of the disk. Then the next four will be the second and second-to-last, and the two next-closest-to-the middle. And so forth.

This is (more or less) OK with a single disk; it's predictable to a degree, but it is still somewhat random. But here's the horrible part:

If you additionally tell it to shuffle among all the disks, not just on one particular disk, then every song it plays, it will do the following:

(1) Pick a random disk.

(2) Act as if you have just asked it to shuffle that particular disk; i.e. select one of four particular songs from it.

Since the chance of getting five or more songs in a row from a single disk are very small, this essentially means that you will never, ever hear anything other than four particular songs from each of your ten disks.