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

If you had a completely randomised shuffle then theoretically yes, you would expect this to occur about once every 87 billion shuffles (the total number of different ways you can sequence 14 titles) (so realistically for most people, not even once their entire life time), however no shuffle algorithm in common usage actually IS completely randomised.

This is because when humans shuffle something they don’t actually want a truly random order, they want a diverse order. In a completely random shuffle you would expect some short sequences of similar/correctly ordered songs to appear quite often, and humans don’t want those to happen at all when they shuffle something, so the vast majority of shuffle algorithms isn’t actually truly random, but skews the results to prevent/reduce any short patterns occurring in the shuffled order, so for most real shuffle algorithms, it’s not just vanishingly unlikely, it’ll be completely impossible

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