Random (?) play of USB tunes

Are you considering it across different times that you start the car, or will it play the same song twice in a single trip?

I've noticed that when I have it play music from my phone, it will sometimes start over in the random order, repeating the same songs I heard a week or two ago - but this is controlled by my phone, not the car.

Another possibility is that it really IS random - humans are notoriously bad at recognizing "random"; we feel like if we hear a song twice, it's not very random. But it's just as likely to play as any other song. This is especially true if it's re-shuffling each time you turn the car on; many MP3 players will only reshuffle once, then play through all the music once, so you hear everything exactly once, but in a random order. If the car reshuffles every time you turn it on, it probably won't seem very random to you.

Even worse, if it just picks a random song from all possible songs each time (i.e. choosing songs "with replacement"), then you might even hear the same song twice in a row.

On my computer, I made a special playlist that contains only songs that haven't been played in the past few weeks; when I choose it, I know I'll hear something I haven't heard in a while, making it seem just a bit more random, even if it decides to re-shuffle everything.

 

It might be my imagination, but I think I have to agree.

I can have hundreds and hundreds of songs on a USB stick and when I choose random it seems like it is selecting from a pool of about 30.

Could I be imagining this? Certainly.

USB sticks are cheap enough that I just keep 3-4 of them with different musical styles and folders on each.