Imagine your music library lined up album by album on the X axis. The Y axis will be % of album to be played. Now, draw a line, squiggly, gaussian, whatever and avoiding (lower on the Y axis) some albums/bands/genres and increasing the frequency of other albums/bands/genres. This will adjust the frequency of the songs played in the shuffle according to your drawn curve. This would be an easy to steer your shuffle away from the stuff you gotten bored of and a faster way to change it around if you like.
-- leinypoo13, Sep 10 2010

Perhaps this will serve as an explanation. http://www.youtube....watch?v=pUlw3ACdN5s
[rcarty, Sep 11 2010]

I like this idea, except that it might be a little self-prophesying. As the albums at the higher z lines keep coalescing back to the zero, the lower lines, farther along the x, will be increasingly less likely to pop up in a random draw. There may come a time when you think "why haven't I heard that one-hit-wonder song in a while?".

I wonder if there is a solution (middle-ground) for this...
-- Wily Peyote, Sep 10 2010


That's a pretty insensitive appraisal considering [link].
-- rcarty, Sep 11 2010


That would require one heck of a patient mouse hand! With discrete values along the X axis, you would have to pause at each value (album/band/genre) while drawing your line.

Now, if you could sort the albums/bands/genres such that they *were*, in a sense, continuous (e.g. similar genres beside each other, ordered by year of release, etc.), then you would have something cool. I can see drawing a continuous histogram curve through that.
-- Capt Skinny, Sep 13 2010



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