Is it just me or does shuffle seem to not shuffle very well?  I notice if I put a big playlist together and attempt to shuffle it, I will almost invariably hear two songs by the same artist, often from the same album in a row multiple times over the course of the playlist.  I know this happens from time to time, but the frequency sometimes makes me wonder if shuffle is indeed shuffling.  Am I the only one that has this issue or am I just being picky?  I used iTunes in Windows before switching to Linux and the shuffle on iTunes never caused me to wonder if I had turned shuffle on.  I used the OpenSuSE packages to install Amarok, if there are improvements to be had from building my own or getting the packages from an alternate source, I'll gladly try.

To be clear, in general I love Amarok.  I've been consistently pleased with the way it works, but this minor thing is driving me crazy as I listen to random playlists frequently.  I'm already prepped for someone telling me I'm crazy and/or picky but I thought I'd ask anyway.

There are weightings for shuffle play - have you tried fiddling with these? Check the same menu where you turned on shuffle play.

Ah, I see those now, though I used the convenient click button at the bottom of the playlist to turn shuffle on.  I'm not sure those will help my perceived issue.  It seems like it's a function of the random choice alg.  Basically I don't want it to pick the same artist twice in a row.  I'm not sure if that's something that could be addressed with a favor mode or not.  "Favor -> Different Artist Every Time" or something I suppose.  And that mode could understand that if there's only one artist in the playlist it should just do standard shuffle.  I can definitely say that I'd check that box.

I suspect that this may be a sampling question. There are two kinds of sampling that are relevant here, sampling with replacement and sampling without replacement. Think of a jar of marbles. Pick one out and note its color. If you put the marble back in before choosing the next one that’s replacement, if you discard it and then chose another that’s sampling without replacement.

Most random choice mechanisms use sampling with replacement, what most users want is sampling without replacement. With replacement one should expect to hear the same song twice or even three times in a row every once in a long while—the odds for this can be easily calculated--or it may seem like the player ‘likes’ a few songs, that is to be expected. Without replacement you gradually work your way through your collection without any repeats.

So, I guess that what you want to do is request that the Amarok g_ds implement with replacement or without replacement as sampling options.

    jab

That's an interesting point.  I wonder if AmaroK implements shuffle in the way you're describing?  It seems counter-intuitive to me to replace the track into the pool after playback.  It seems like you'd want to shuffle through the entire playlist and then recycle at the end.  Either way, I'm not sure implementing non-replacement would solve my issue either.  In the end, there's still a random chance of choosing the same artist two consecutive times, even if you're only choosing from non-played tracks.

I was trying to address your second point, 'not shuffling well'. ipod users have famously griped about their random selection engine, mostly because they didn't understand what to expect from random selection. Though I haven't dug in to the scripting side of Amarok, one might...

In a separate vein, it would be nice to exclude certain files and directories etc. For example Creative leaves behind directories named 'WMA 64K' when is loads my Zen Nano which means Amarok sees duplicates.

    jab