Why does my CD changer's "random" play always gravitate toward certain tracks?

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Is this normal? Yeah, I still use a 5-CD changer at home; fuck a iPod. Anyway, I put the CDs in on random play, five of 'em at a time, and almost inevitably, with any given CD, the player seems to pick out maybe three or four tracks (out of however many) on each CD to keep going back to. Sometimes (as with the new Trina CD and the new Brooks and Dunn CD, maybe, where the player somehow keeps returning to three or four REALLY GOOD tracks), this might make me overrate CDs; other times, it might make me underrate them. This weekend the live Notekillers CD kept going back to track #13, which sounded great, but it was driving me crazy!(And yeah, I know, I could just play the CDs all the way through instead; I DO--just not in my living room very often. I like how random play lets songs take me by surprise, so I don't even necessarily know who they're by when they jump out at me.) Anyway, has anybody ever noticed this problem before? It's happened ever since I bought the stereo, a year or so ago. And I really don't mind much, but it does bug me sometimes.

(Oh yeah, my other paranoid theory is that the tracks the player keeps returning to might be programmed into the CDS themselves, coded electronically as "singles" of a sort! But that can't be it, right?)

― xhuxk, Monday, 17 October 2005 14:09 (twenty years ago)

Did you skip right over the theory that maybe your CD changer has likes and dislikes of its own?

― DJ Guitarist, Monday, 17 October 2005 14:12 (twenty years ago)

Yeah, that occured to me too, actually!

― xhuxk, Monday, 17 October 2005 14:14 (twenty years ago)

Haha. I had a sixty-disc changer and still experienced this. My CD player liked The Who, Chappaquiddick Skyline and Tahiti 80.

One time I swear I pulled a CD out it had been playing way too much and it found a track on a comp from the same band and played that damn thing again and again!

― righteousmaelstrom (righteousmaelstrom), Monday, 17 October 2005 14:30 (twenty years ago)

Yeah, I think CD players are collaborating to drive us mad. It was annoying enough, two CD players ago, that I made sure that the next one I bought had non-repeating random play.

― William Paper Scissors (Rock Hardy), Monday, 17 October 2005 14:37 (twenty years ago)

key word there is "NON-REPEATING" random play. What the thread-starter is experiencing is that kind of fake random play where it doesn't remember what's been played and starts all over again from the full selection every time. Extremely annoying.

― sleeve (sleeve), Monday, 17 October 2005 14:41 (twenty years ago)

http://www25.brinkster.com/ranmath/misund/avg01.htm

― Myonga Von Bontee (Myonga Von Bontee), Monday, 17 October 2005 15:20 (twenty years ago)

If you flip a coin 10 times and get five tails in a row do you think the coin is defective, or somehow it's a different kind of coin not obeying the laws of chance, somehow broke to come up more tails?

I'm skeptical, Chuck. I don't use random selection ever but I'd want to see you do a tabulation of what you have in the player, the total number of tunes in aggregate, the number of plays and what actually played in a period of listening. Chances are -- hah -- chances (?!) --you more likely remember the good tunes -- and because you liked them and your brain is non-random (I think), you're remembering them better and more fondly than the random stuff, which is suppressed.

Anyway, random selection doesn't mean a different song each time until the library is played through. That would be a sort of evolutionary selection by an intelligent design. Ha-ha. Maybe we should truck down to Dover, PA, and listen to some testimony.

― George the Animal Steele, Monday, 17 October 2005 15:40 (twenty years ago)

weird, I have a 5-cd changer and it just plays each track once in random order and then stops. That's if I actually sit around through 5 entire CDs.

― miccio (miccio), Monday, 17 October 2005 15:43 (twenty years ago)

It'a non-repeating random play CD changer, miccio.

― righteousmaelstrom (righteousmaelstrom), Monday, 17 October 2005 15:49 (twenty years ago)

well, duh. I just didn't know other people's went on for eternity, looping away. Never seen those before.

― miccio (miccio), Monday, 17 October 2005 15:51 (twenty years ago)

>If you flip a coin 10 times and get five tails in a row do you think the coin is defective, or somehow it's a different kind of coin not obeying the laws of chance, somehow broke to come up more tails?<

Well, no. But if I flipped a different coin every day for a month, and most of the coins either gave me five tails in a row or five heads in a row, I might well think my flipping hand was defective.

One thing I left out in my initial post: Sometimes, if I switch a CD that's been in the changer for a while into a different *slot* in the changer (say, from slot #1 to slot # 4), the changer will gravitate toward *different* tracks than before. I am not making this up. (Though right, I've yet to tabulate it with graph paper, either.)

― xhuxk, Monday, 17 October 2005 16:00 (twenty years ago)

I just didn't know other people's went on for eternity, looping away. Never seen those before.

For me, it's the opposite: I've found it particularly difficult to find changers that have non-repeating random play. It's not a feature that seems to be loudly trumpeted by manufacturers.

― righteousmaelstrom (righteousmaelstrom), Monday, 17 October 2005 16:29 (twenty years ago)

I've found it particularly difficult to find changers that have non-repeating random play. It's not a feature that seems to be loudly trumpeted by manufacturers.

JVC XL-M317 reprazent. I haven't used it in over a year, since my computer became my audio system here in the office. Maybe I'll sell it one of these days.

― William Paper Scissors (Rock Hardy), Monday, 17 October 2005 16:38 (twenty years ago)

my girlfriends stereo which now lives in the bedroom only has a little button with a pair of dice as the icon...and it has no rhyme or reason. its clearly not a non-repeat, but somhow avoids chuck's classic problem.

mine doesn't repeat..but it seems to only shuffle 3 of the 5 at a time...then eventualy comes to realize it has 2 other discs of options.

and the machine's favorite is ALWAYS the cd i decided on last, and am least enthusiastic to hear (this is sometimes for the best).

― bb (bbrz), Monday, 17 October 2005 16:44 (twenty years ago)

Still can't tell without a plot of some kind. Anyway, remember it's consumer electronics. Since it's all hardware with operating code written into a couple ROM chips, there's no guarantee that the code is going to be right. Bugs in all things and that. Five years ago my television/cable hook-up never crashed like a computer. Now it does.

― George the Animal Steele, Monday, 17 October 2005 16:56 (twenty years ago)

MVB OTM again!

― petesmith (plsmith), Monday, 17 October 2005 17:17 (twenty years ago)

yeah, it's possible the person who designed your CD player cheaped out and the randomizing algorithm is crappy. randomness isn't easy to do well, or rather it's easy to do poorly.

― fortunate hazel (f. hazel), Monday, 17 October 2005 17:20 (twenty years ago)

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