Does Your iPod Play Favorites?

Last spring it dawned on Apple CEO Steve Jobs that the heart of his hit iPod digital music player was the "shuffle." This feature allows users to mix up their entire song collections—thousands of tunes—and play them back in a jumbled order, like a private radio station. Jobs not only moved the popular shuffle option to an exalted place on the top menu of the iPod, he also used the idea as the design principle of the new low-cost iPod Shuffle. Its ad slogan celebrates the serendipity music lovers embrace when their songs are reordered by chance—"Life is random."

But just about everyone who has an iPod has wondered how random the iPod shuffle function really is. From the day I loaded up my first Pod, it was as if the little devil liked to play favorites. It had a particular fondness for Steely Dan, whose songs always seemed to pop up two or three times in the first hour of play. Other songs seemed to be exiled to a forgotten corner of the disk drive. Months after I bought "Wild Thing" from the iTunes store, I'm still waiting for my iPod to cue it up.

More than a year ago, I outlined these concerns to Jobs; he dialed up an engineer who insisted that shuffle played no favorites. Since then, however, millions of new Podders have started shuffling, and the question has been discussed in newspapers, blogs and countless conversations. It's taking on Oliver Stone-like conspiracy buzz.

Apple execs profess amusement. "It's part of the magic of shuffle," says Greg Joswiak, the VP for iPod products. Still, I asked him last week to double-check with the engineers. They flatly assured him that "Random is random," and the algorithm that does the shuffling has been tested and reverified.