March 2, 2007

• Randomize

  Winamp seems to have the worst shuffle ever.  Everyday I hear repeats of songs from the previous day.  Is Winamp really being a pain or is it just a matter of probability?

  Lets go over the math.

  I listen to about 4 hours of music a day.  Assuming 3 minutes per song, that would be 80 songs a day.  Let say I also skip about 20 songs a day.  This makes my total 100 songs a day that I will see in Winamp.

  I have 3000 songs in my library.  If I play a song at random, there is a 3% chance that song would have played the previous day.  But if I play 100 songs, each of which having a 3% chance of being a song from the previous day, that means that each day, I should hear about 3 songs that played the previous day.

  Stupid probability messing up my music experience.

  • 6:14 pm
  • 1 Comment