Maybe what you want is some kind of markov chain, so that the probability of picking a given song next is conditioned last song (or n songs) played previously.
Of course, it's not actually random then, except that at each stage, you'd be drawing from some distribution to chose a track. But you could do some neat things like increasing the probability of picking tracks with a similar mood or tempo, if you mark up your tracks accordingly.
Erm, there's also at least one paper I've seen presented recently that has something to do with picking tracks and artists and organising that kind of database, but I can't find a link to it at the moment :-( There's active academic research into track-choosing, though! There are also things like HPDJ which are even more clever, though may well require a bit more computation than the iriver could manage.
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chiming
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Date: January 9th, 2004 06:47 am (UTC)From:Of course, it's not actually random then, except that at each stage, you'd be drawing from some distribution to chose a track. But you could do some neat things like increasing the probability of picking tracks with a similar mood or tempo, if you mark up your tracks accordingly.
Erm, there's also at least one paper I've seen presented recently that has something to do with picking tracks and artists and organising that kind of database, but I can't find a link to it at the moment :-( There's active academic research into track-choosing, though! There are also things like HPDJ which are even more clever, though may well require a bit more computation than the iriver could manage.