Let The Music Speak: An Analysis Report on
shuffle algorithm of music players that can enhance
music listening experience
Akshay Syal
Btech Student
VIT Vellore
Bhopal, India
akshaysyal19@gmail.com
Abstract— The shuffling algorithm of most music players or
music streaming services although work well and produce
random list of songs but many users complain about the
shuffling algorithm playing a few songs from the same artist
right after each other. Now there is nothing wrong about the
current shuffling algorithms like the Fisher-Yates algorithm, it
shuffles well and produce random results but what the users
really want is a playlist in which songs of same artist are
distributed across the whole playlist. The algorithm proposed in
this paper produces an even less random playlist but the output
playlist will feel “more random” to the users.
Keywords— Shuffling algorithm, Fisher-Yates Algorithm,
Gambler’s Fallacy
I. INTRODUCTION
One of the most common features implemented in a music
player is shuffle. Many users of music player apps or music
streaming services complain about the shuffling algorithm
saying that the player plays a few songs from the same artist
right after each other. Fisher-Yates shuffle(a well-known
shuffling algorithm) is used to generate a perfectly random
shuffling of a playlist. However, perfectly random means that
the following two orders are equally likely to occur (different
colours represent different artists).
Many people don’t want to listen songs by the same artist
playing two or three times within a short time period. But if
they just heard a song from a particular artist, that doesn’t
mean that the next song will be more likely from a different
artist in a perfectly random order. Hence people don’t like
perfect randomness.
II. EXISTING WORK
A. Fisher-Yates shuffle
The Fisher–Yates shuffle is an algorithm for generating
a random permutation of a finite sequence—in plain terms,
the algorithm shuffles the sequence. The algorithm effectively
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puts all the elements into a hat; it continually determines the
next element by randomly drawing an element from the hat
until no elements remain.
The algorithm effectively puts all the elements into a hat;
it continually determines the next element by randomly
drawing an element from the hat until no elements remain. The
algorithm produces an unbiased permutation: every
permutation is equally likely. The modern version of the
algorithm is efficient: it takes time proportional to the number
of items being shuffled and shuffles them in place. Time
Complexity of this algorithm is O(n).
-- To shuffle an array a of n elements (indices 0..n-1):
for i from n−1 downto 1 do
j ← random integer such that 0 ≤ j ≤ i
exchange a[j] and a[i]
III. PROPOSED WORK
After considering users’ expectations and previous works
it was concluded that people don’t like perfect randomness.
Shuffle is hard for music players because what people
understand as random and what random actually means are
two different things. The difficulty comes in matching user
expectations. Users will say their expectation is songs
randomly selected, but there are many things they don't want
from a random selection. There is nothing really wrong with
your outline for randomly shuffling a playlist, other than it
doesn't really meet users’ expectations of shuffle.
• Users don't want to hear the same song multiple times
in a row.
• Users don't want to the same artist/album played
consecutively or too close together.
• Users want to hear 1-2 songs from every artist/genre in
their collection before repeats occur.
• Random sequences that match established patterns are
viewed as not random and disliked. This would be
things like playing track 2 from albums A, B, C then
playing track 3 from those albums, or playing track 1
from A, track 2 from B, track 3 from C. This would
also be if songs followed a rock, country, rap, pop
cycle or songs played in alphabetical order.
 • Over playing less liked artists or under playing Adding songs to the playlist
favourite artists creates dissatisfaction.
• Subsets of songs shouldn't be played in the same order
as previous iterations. similarly, the last X songs
shouldn't be in the first X songs in the next iteration.
Users really want something like a curated playlist that
cycles through their collection and plays songs semi-
randomly along an equal distribution.

1. Doubly circular linked list for making songs playlist.

The list stores song name, singer’s name, song’s
positional value and index of the song indexed
according to number of songs of same singer.
2. Singly Linked list for storing singer’s name and
number of his/her songs.
3. Shuffle is implemented by giving each song a
positional value. Then bubble sort will be
implemented.
4. Logic behind positional value:
Let’s say there are singers A, B, C and their songs are a,
aa, aaa, b, bb, c.
• Default spacing is given to songs of the
same singers to distribute them. It will be
equal to k/n where n is number of songs of
the artist and k is from [0, n) i.e. index of
song of that singer.
• Initial offset which is equal to random
number between [0, 1/n]. This gives a
random spacing to songs within the same
category. Adding more songs to playlist to
produce final playlist
• Individual offset which is equal to random
number between [-1/10n, 1/10n]. This gives
random spacings to all songs in the playlist
regardless of their singers.
5. To implement shuffle:
• Traverse through the music playlist.
• Access the singer’s name of the song and
search it in singers list by traversing
through it.
• Access the number of singer’s song (n).
• Update the positional value of the song
according to the logic explained above.
• Implement bubble sort in songs list
according to their positional value in
ascending order.
IV. RESULTS AND OBSERVATION
The shuffled result roughly looks like this:
Shuffled Playlist V. CONCLUSION
The proposed algorithm produces output which is a
shuffled list including all items in the input, which is produced
by the algorithm described above. The randomness
requirements are covered in the algorithm description. The
algorithm doesn’t perform a perfect random shuffle and its
time complexity is O(n^2) but arranges the songs in a semi-
randomly way along an equal distribution.

REFERENCES

[1] Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in C by Mark Allen Weiss

[2] https://community.spotify.com/t5/iOS-iPhone-iPad/Shuffle-play-is-
not-random/td-p/750619
[3] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/375842/shu
ffle-in-music-players
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle
[5] http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/12/21/what-does-randomness-
look-like/
[6] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-randomness-rules-
our-world/
[7] Link to video presentation https://vimeo.com/425563514