6.15.2007

iPod Needs a New Rand() Generator

3 months of daily iPod listening.


3 months x 4 weeks/month x 5 days/week x 4 hours/day x 20 songs/hour= 4,803 song plays

Number of song on iPod: 880


My iPod is usually on shuffle, with everything selected... unless I select everything with a low play count and shuffle those.


With 4,803 song plays each of the 880 songs should have been played 5 times.


Yet, 5 songs had 0 plays (and 0 skips), and another 29 just had 1.


The part of me which took 16 hours of graduate level statistics is screaming about bell curves.


Maybe they don't need a new rand() generator, but it sucks to not ever hear 5% of my songs.

2 comments:

Phoebe said...

Half a percent, by my calculations. That doesn't sound hugely improbable to me; what did the peak look like?

Yet Another Girl said...

Hard to tell. The positive play counts are messed up by the few times I really want to hear one thing.