I’m getting suspicious about WinAmp’s shuffle feature. Today, it’s played Smoke and Ashes by Tracy Chapman no less than three times. I mean, fair enough, it’s a seriously great song, but then so is Hotel Columbia by Jesse Malin, and I can’t remember the last time it picked that. It’s also got a curious affinity for Emerson, Lake and Palmer and mr scruff, but I don’t think I can ever recall it picking anything by Amos Lee, Keane or Joss Stone. That’s not to say it’s completely without taste (it’s just picked Delta Lady by Joe Cocker, followed by Rifle Eyes by cLOUDDEAD) but it just seems to have definite preferences. Which doesn’t really match up with ‘random’ in my book…
(anyone suggesting I use iTunes instead will be shot, okay?)
my ex-housmate’s Winamp install used to play Abba every second track (20 songs out of about 500). I’ve never trusted Winamp since.
If you ain’t going to run iTunes, then you might as well use XMMS under Cygwin. Because that isn’t overly silly. Honest.
My Winamp favours, in no particular order, The Very Best Of Smooth Jazz, S Club 7, The Brand New Heavies, Matt Redman and Aretha Franklin. It never ever plays Joss Stone (see, a pattern!) or Maroon 5.
I find that mine manages patterns based on types of music and rarely ‘jars’ the selection, instead passing through genres. For instance, it very rarely does Anastacia followed by Obituary without going via, say, Bon Jovi, Iron Maiden and Slayer first.
Having said that, it does seem to be pretty random. I’ve got just shy of 3000 tracks, mind.