Can you shuffle an album in the numerical order it appears on in the original track listing? Like, let’s say the album has 14 songs, statistically, if you shuffle enough times then the order of the songs would appear in the track list order, no?

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Can you shuffle an album in the numerical order it appears on in the original track listing? Like, let’s say the album has 14 songs, statistically, if you shuffle enough times then the order of the songs would appear in the track list order, no?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It depends on how we implement the idea of “shuffle”.

If you treat the tracks like a deck of cards, put them in a random order, then start playing them in that order then yes, you can end up with a shuffled play order that mimics the original order.

If you *on purpose* pick any track but the first one, THEN make a list of the remaining ones, shuffle that list, and play that order, then you might get “almost the original order” but you’ll never get “the original order”.

Writing a shuffle that *never* puts more than two or three tracks in the “right” order is pretty tough to describe, but possible. For how small most albums are you could probably do a shuffle, check if it’s “wrong”, and just try again if it’s “wrong”.

But all of these are “a shuffle”. So the trick here is you have to know *how* you’re shuffling to know if it’s possible to get the original track list.

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