How do I get a true "random" shuffle in Itunes?

So what's the deal? Is the selection of shuffle based off of my previous, non-shuffle selection ratio, or is there a darker, more sinister "Apple's prefered list of songs" angle going on?

LOL. Your not paranoid if you don't get out the songs you want to get ;-/
Nice science bit in the Wired link. I do think people genereally have a funny idea of real randomness. I seldom Party Shuffle the library, and when I do I mix things up by choosing from which list Shuffle will source when iTunes asks.

What do people want from shuffle? I get a good result when I shuffle a Smart Playlist. Are people trying to get the "radio experience" with the Shuffle function?

On smart playlists I use them as "reports" of the library, just like tuning into a certain radio show that plays rock, rap or golden oldies. If I'm in the mood for a certain mood of songs I'll go to that smart playlist, and I get surprised by what turns up when I Shuffle that list.

Party Shuffle seems to just select a few albums and intermix them with a few other random tracks. One idea is to set up a Smartlist of least played tracks--via play count.

HTH

Gene--

Any tips on using Smart Playlists?

What I've done is this: set up a Smart Playlist with a single condition, its Last Played date is not in the last 45 days. So I don't hear the same song right away.

As for it not playing certain artists or albums as often, that's a bit harder, particularly if they allowed people to set fairly rigid rules about how often an artist could play. They'd have to put in some pretty serious safeguards against people doing really irrational things.

Suppose I had an iTunes library with 20 songs: 19 from artist A and 1 from Artist B. But I tell iTunes that it can't play two songs in a row from the same artist. How does it reconcile these instructions? In this case, it would have to repeat the one song from artist B in between each song from artist A.

Now, suppose I tell it that the same artist has to be 3 songs apart. Essentially, there's no way for iTunes to accomplish this and still play all the songs in my library.

What would be very cool would be a query language like SQL, where you could say "select one song from every artist, but not from artist B, and only where the song is less than 3 minutes" and so on. But I imagine that they've thought of it, and discarded it as something not many people would use.

best,

charlie