Does Your iPod Play Favorites?

More specifically, when an iPod does a shuffle, it reorders the songs much the way a Vegas dealer shuffles a deck of cards, then plays them back in the new order. So if you keep listening for the week or so it takes to complete the list, you will hear everything, just once. But people generally listen only to the first few dozen songs. In theory, that sample should be evenly distributed among all the artists and albums in their collections. So why do you typically get three Wilco songs in an hour while Aretha Franklin waits in the wings forever?

The question will be even more important to owners of the new tiny iPod Shuffles. These use a new feature called autofill to load the one-ounce players with a supposedly random selection of 120 or so songs from much larger collections. The first few times I tried this, I found some disturbing clusters in the songs chosen. More than once the "random" playlist included three tracks from the same album! Since there are more than 3,000 tunes in my library, this seemed to defy the odds.

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STEVEN LEVY

The Technologist