iTunes Shuffle is not very random, can it be fixed to be more random? I have over 1000 songs and when I turn on shuffle songs I get repeats. That should Not happen.
How many duplicates are there in your 1000 songs? E.g. same song from a different album. The shuffle feature probably takes no account of which random track is placed next to which so if you have any duplicates at all there will be a non-zero chance of the two copies of the same song ending up together. The more duplicates the more the chance increases that will be at least one such pairing.
tt2
Notalarmmman,
In my experience, if you start iTunes shuffling and don't touch anything, it will go through all the songs once before repeating any. However, if you go to another list and come back, or change the list, the shuffle logic resets itself and then you may well re-hear something you heard recently.
You can make a Smart Playlist that includes a rule "Last Played" "is not in the last" "X" "weeks" (pick X to your liking) and let it shuffle. As soon as a song finishes playing, it disappears from the list. So even if Shuffle is "forgetful," the song cannot come up again for X weeks.
Changing the list, does that include skipping songs as well? I do skip songs...a lot.
Thanks about the Smart Playlist I will definitely look in to it.
UMMM about that duplicate songs thing if I really counted All the songs there would be close to 3-4 thousand.
I have been lazy about getting rid of them. I had some problems with where music was stored on my computer.
I have recently corrected that problem and have not got rid of the duplicates Yet... *it takes time-a lot of it LOL*
Apple's official advice on duplicates is here Find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library. It is a manual process and the article fails to explain some of the potential pitfalls such as lost ratings and playlist membership, or that sometimes the same file can be represented by multiple entries in the library and that deleting one and recycling the file will break the other.
Use Shift > View > Show Exact Duplicate Items to display duplicates as this is normally a more useful selection. You need to manually select all but one of each group to remove. Sorting the list by Date Added may make it easier to select the appropriate tracks, however this works best when performed immediately after the dupes have been created. If you have multiple entries in iTunes connected to the same file on the hard drive then don't send to the recycle bin.
Use my DeDuper script if you're not sure, don't want to do it by hand, or want to preserve ratings, play counts and playlist membership. See this thread for background, this post for detailed instructions, and please take note of the warning to backup your library before deduping.
(If you don't see the menu bar press ALT to show it temporarily or CTRL+B to keep it displayed.)
The most recent version of the script can tidy dead links as long as there is at least one live duplicate to merge stats and playlist membership to and should cope sensibly when the same file has been added via multiple paths.
The above is intended to get rid of true duplicates, the same song by the same artist from the same album. For shuffled music you might also want a list of unique songs, i.e. no two songs with exactly the same title by the same artist. That is still reasonably tricky to do by hand but is feasible if the number listed by Show Duplicates is on the small side. Hmm, I think I've just found another possible refinement for my script. 😀
tt2
I have over 1000 songs in Itunes. You would think with that many songs shuffle would not repeat any of them. Can this be fixed? I play All songs by checked songs.
