The Mystery of the Erroneous Shuffle

I have about 12,000 songs in iTunes, totaling >66 gigabytes of storage space that would take 38 days to listen straight through (according to the stats in iTunes) – clearly I have a massive amount of music. In order to manage this huge repository of music and satiate my eclectic musical tastes, I’ve developed the habit of ranking everything with the appropriate star rating: 5 stars – music that I will never get tired of, 4 stars – music that I currently think is special, new, or otherwise interesting, 3 stars – music that I like and want to hear, but may not be that special, 2 stars or less – meh. Also, I’ve set up “Smart Playlists” (where you define a rule that automatically selects music from the library) according to my typical listening moods (3-5 star, 4-5 star, and 5 star) and when only want to hear music that I haven’t heard in a while, there are “unheard recently” versions of these lists that filter out any song with a “last played” date in the previous 30 days.

I’ve been following this plan for a few years now and it seems to work well for me, although the “unheard recently” playlists never seem to work as expected. I use these lists almost exclusively, and for the most part they provide me with a continuous random stream of music that I like and haven’t heard in a while. But every so often, it’ll play a song I’m pretty sure I just heard. It won’t be so obvious as playing a song that played in the last hour or so, but perhaps playing one today that I’m sure I heard yesterday or earlier in the week. (It’s supposed to have a 30 day window, remember?) You can’t understand how annoying this was for me. (well, if you can then you have my pity)

Like the good little software engineer that I am, the gears of my mind, fueled by what appeared to me was a problem that needed to be explained (and solved if possible), went to work speculating on possible causes. It seemed to me, there must be a problem with the code inside the ipod that is responsible for handling playlists – explanation found! Oh well, Since I don’t have access to any of the tools or influence with the developers to do anything about fixing internal iPod code, I resigned myself to waiting for the inevitable fix that would surely come in the next iPod software update.

Since then, I’m now on my 3rd iPod, and there have been who knows how many software revisions. Unfortunately the problem seems to persist. It makes me wonder why they refuse to fix this seemingly simple playlist glitch? Don’t they listen to their customers? Are they incompetent? Perhaps there’s something that’s too difficult or too expensive about the device that prevents them from fixing it? Perhaps there’s a deeper, more mysterious and malevolent reason why Apple seems to ignore the simple desires of it’s innocent and loyal customers.

– begin satire –

… after all, they are a big evil corporation.

The Great Apple Shuffle Conspiracy

Mind Control – no, don’t look away, don’t just roll your eyes and go back to update your facebook status.  Stay with me because I’ve uncovered the SCIENTIFIC proof that Apple and other EVIL corporations have infiltrated the government and are conspiring to CONTROL YOUR MIND through the QUANTUM effects of ACOUSTIC HARMONIC CYCLE PATTERNS.

This is what they DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW! A systematic plan, conceived in the 1950′s by your government, evil rich business owners, and the same scientists that cloned Hitler.

Watch this video and you’ll never be the same again!

– end satire –

Dr. Leonard Horowitz

Anyone who knows me knows that there are a great many things that I don’t know. There are many reasons for this, the primary one being the years I spent locked within a closed social group. Anyway, Since I’ve become a skeptic, I’ve decided to branch out as much as I possibly can, reading and researching all kinds of strange things and losing a lot of sleep. I’ve also discovered a love for meeting and talking w/ people, especially people who think differently than myself – and there’s no better (and safer) place to do that than social media [facebook, twitter, etc].

A while back I was tweeting something snarky (as I always do) about how vaccinations are responsible for wiping out smallpox (which generated more angry responses than any other tweet I’ve ever tweeted) and among the nasty responses came back a conversation starter from a reasonably civil person, located in Baltimore (near me). I don’t remember how the conversation went, but eventually I had her send me a number of links to videos she claimed would “change the way I thought about vaccines”.

The main video she wanted me to watch was this one by Dr. Leonard Horowitz: “In Lies We Trust: The CIA, Hollywood and Bioterrorism“ I warn you, it’s an excruciating 2.5 hour video that should’ve been edited down to less than a half hour (at the most). The video attempts to make a case for this view of the world: The country is controlled by corporations, that want you to be afraid enough to be dependent upon their goods and services (drugs, guns, whatever), as some sort of engineered replacement for the economic engine that used to be “war” (thus the “war on cancer”, “war on aids”, “war on terror”). I think he throws the word “genocide” in there for good measure, although I’m not sure where that ties in because frankly, my brain got all mushy and stopped listening after the first hour or so. (To be honest, I’m currently working on a detailed breakdown of this video)

I have to admit I’m a little biased. Since I’m pretty good at recognizing the “red flags” of nut-job-ness, and couldn’t help but make fun of the very poor production quality, I had a real hard time taking the video seriously. That said, there were a few things that I didn’t know about that I’ve put on my “list of things” to read more about, for example the “Report from Iron Mountain” cited as a large part of Horowitz’s evidence (It turns out this paper is satire). Also, the video made me think about why it is that people are taken in by such things, and in fact how I’ve been taken in by many seemingly rational arguments in the past. (I used to believe I had rational reasons for being a christian. I even used the banana argument once – yeah, go ahead an laugh)

One of the statements made in the video that stuck with me was this, “Why have we advanced in technology, but declined in health, freedom, and quality of life?” When I heard him say it, I thought, “yeah, I wonder about that”. But then, since I’ve become such a frustratingly questioning person I thought, “I wonder if that’s even true?” It certainly “feels” true; We live in a world surrounded with wonderful technological gadgets but it “seems” as though everyone is always sick, oppressed, or unhappy. But, could this be a matter of point of view? Could it be that the internet and television has made it so that we hear about everything bad that happens on the planet, so we now think the world has gotten worse while it’s really just a matter of access to information?

Well, I don’t know – but I’m going to see if I can find out. (Yet something else added to my list of things to research) Anyway, the point is that I no longer just accept the premise because it feels right, I question and try to determine truth with a little leg work if necessary – a seemingly simple thing that most people don’t do!

Solving the iPod Shuffle Mystery

So why doesn’t Apple fix their annoying little music player? Given my inability to talk to the experts at apple, it seems like this is an unanswerable question. Plus, given some of the possible explanations (insert conspiracy theory here) who’s to say they would give me an honest answer? The person I might get on the phone would probably be in on the conspiracy! (And we all know that when they deny the conspiracy, they are only confirming it!*)

We could use the scientific method to determine which answer to this question is more likely to be correct (I say more likely, because as we all know science doesn’t prove truth, it only points to it by eliminating possibilities that are not truth). Of course, this would entail trying to come up with a list of possibilities, figuring out a way to falsify each one by experiment, and testing them one by one. This sounds like a daunting and tedious task, even if we narrow down the list to only the more likely candidates based upon an expert’s knowledge on the domain (for example, a master software engineer such as myself *).

Or we could remember the skeptics mantra, “question everything” or “nothing is sacred” or “hey idiot! Check your assumptions!” or … well, you get the picture.  As it turns out, after several years of believing that there was a unfixed glitch in the world’s favorite music player, I never bothered to verify if the problem was actually real. I didn’t question my assumptions.

Apparently this was a much easier problem to solve, instead of trying to determine a cause from a huge batch of possibilities, all I had to do was find evidence that what I thought I was experiencing (repeated songs) was actually happening.

When you sync your iPod with iTunes, the time and date of the last time a song was played is copied into the song catalog on your computer. It’s there for you to see, if you  go to the master song list, and right-click on the header of the table containing song information, you can add the column “Last Played”. Once the column is visible you can sort by clicking on the column header (it’ll show a little arrow pointing up or down depending upon the sort direction).  To determine if a song has been repeated, all I’d have to do is let the playlist run, without interruption for a while, days perhaps, and after a while check the play times for gaps. These gaps would indicate a song that was played had been played again, therefore their last played time was updated and moved out of that place in the list.

By now you can probably guess that I haven’t been able to find any evidence of repeated songs. So it wasn’t aliens, government mind control experiments, neglect, or even just simple bad software quality control (although I can’t vouch for Apple’s QA), as it turns out it was something much simpler that I discovered by doing a little investigation – it was an illusion.

* starred passages indicate satire or sarcasm