Why does the shuffle in Winamp suck so damn much?

[Jason]

I'm running Winamp 5.091, the regular version rather than the PRO version. I like to load up rather beefy playlists, usually at least 200 songs, and often times well over 500. When I turn on shuffling the damn thing ends up shuffling through way too many of the same songs. I've tried messing with the "shuffle morph rate" slider in the settings. That doesn't seem to do much good.

Any ideas as to how to make the shuffling a bit more random and efficient? Or should I just be saying, "Adios amigo!" to Winamp and running some other music app like iTunes? (Before you immediately jump to this option, especially you Sarien, I'd like to know how the shuffling is in iTunes, and I'd also like to know if iTunes can handle a library of roughly 11,000 mp3s.)

[PaulOakenfold]

iTunes does a good job, but I think it has some formula that slightly increases the play-count of songs that you tend to listen to more often.

Kelly Clarkson is right up there on top 25 most played list on my iTunes! Kill me now.

[Sarien]

Kelly Clarkson is right up there on top 25 most played list on my iTunes! Kill me now.

Click the little box to the left of it so that it's unchecked.
Then it'll only ever play if you double click on it.

[Benno]

foobar2000:
pros:
easy on system resources (unlike pc itunes)
plugin for every avialable audio format
features features features

cons:
isn't easily skinable, but who cares what a program in your systray looks like?

the shuffle on fb2k seems to works fine, but then again thanks to TMV i've been listening to whole albums lately so maybe I just don't notice.

[Jason]

While we're on the subject of music, does anyone know of a program that will scan through my entire music collection and re-tag everything with proper shit from a database like CDDB or FreeDB? When I import my music into iTunes, a ton of stuff just lands at the bottom because the tags are fucked up and it doesn't know what the genre/artist/etc is supposed to be.

[Stabwound]

I use Tag&Rename. http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm

It's not COMPLETLY automated but you can load up your entire collection and just select an album, and hit a button and you can tag from CDDB or Amazon(which is a LOT better). It's the best program of it's kind, imo. It still takes a bit of work, but it lets you make sure there are no problems before you tag the files, as a lot of CDDB entries are bad or wrong.

[Jason]

I'll give it a look see! Thanks, dude.

[hogo]

Look for something Called Music Tagger

advice though only do like 150 songs at a time or the mofo will run slow as shit

[za gophar]

musicmatch jukebox shuffles good. i use a 2000+ song playlist and it seems totally random.

[cundor]

windows media player also pics the same songs after a while. My playlist has for about 1500 songs but for some reason it always plays the same Pearl Jam songs...weird but most of all annoying!

[Superted]

I had that problem, with it playng the same song, so I simply randomized the playlist instead and played it in order. However, it's a bugger if I want to play a specific song.

[1ight]

For winamp:
Instead of using shuffle, if you want, you could just randomize the list and flip is sometimes, I think you can flip the playlist if I remember right. Anyhow, the list will surely be randomized, now you won't have the same shuffle pattern with or without shuffle.

So like ctrl+r (I think that was randomize) keep it down, randomize the list as long as you like, flip the list, randomize again, repeat until you are satisfied. Believe me after this your list will look like a mess.

I'd say that is the best solution for your shuffle problem in winamp.

[Edify]

i use winamp too, the first random song is the first song on the playlist, thats all i really hate about it.