rhythmbox not so random

i use rhythmbox at work (great ipod support) but have been pretty disgusted with it's "shuffle" setting. it was constantly repeating tracks and repeating the same albums over and over. it seems to get "stuck" selecting random tracks from the same dozen or so albums.

started to investigate and found many others having the same issue. but there's a secret setting you can access via gconf-editor to try to random things up a little bit more.

1. open gconf-editor
2. navigate to:
/apps/rhythmbox/state/play_order
3. change the setting to something other than shuffle.

linear-loop - ordered playlist and loops back to the beginning
linear - ordered playlist, but stops when finished
random-by-age-and-rating - random playlist, preferring songs that haven't been played in a while or have a high rating
random-by-age - random playlist, preferring songs that haven't been played in a while
random-by-rating - random playlist, preferring higher rated songs
random-equal-weights - random-ordered playlist where all songs are played in equal amounts
shuffle - completely random (not apparently, it seems to get stuck)

i've set mine to "random-by-age" and things seem a lot better now. just click play to start. don't touch the shuffle or repeat button or you'll wipe out the setting change.

just thought i'd pass this along.

credit where credit is due: thanks to this page and others i dredged up through google to solve my problem.

oops, double post.

Cheers mate, much appreciated fix.

Hey!, nice... I have a launcher in my gnome-panel for when I have changed the reproduction order, to get it back to random. to have one all you have to do is to point a panel launcher to gconftool-2 -t string -s /apps/rhythmbox/state/play_order random-by-age

I set it to random by age and it's still repeating songs that I guess haven't been played much. Sigh.

probably because it's just using the IEEE standard random number...

http://xkcd.com/221/