simon-weber
commented
6 years ago Heyo!
Seems like all playlists share the same seed.
Yup, that's how it works currently. Behind the scenes there's a random number associated with each song, and sorting by random just sorts by this field. Reseeding involves assigning a new random number to each track.
Reopening Google Play Tab and resyncing produced the same results, despite the instructions saying this should reset the seed.
Hm. This worked as expected when I tried it just now, but I can dig into it a bit more. It might have been that Google was slow to reflect the new ordering. All of refreshing the tab, closing and reopening the tab, and restarting Chrome is expected to change it.
Is there a fundamental reason it reuses the seed so much?
Unfortunately, yes. The key piece is that load on Google seems proportionate to the number of adds+deletes+reorderings requested, and too much load quickly makes playlists unusable. Since switching the random ordering often generates the worst case - either a) delete all songs + add all songs, or b) reorder all songs - it's something that can't be done too often.
What do you think about making this explicit and putting it in the ui? I could pretty easily show the date the seed was last changed, as well as a button to manually switch it (without necessarily syncing right away).
Noggog
Heya Simon. Hope you're doing well.
I feel like the random seed that powers the random selection of songs sometimes gets "stuck".
For example, just now I made a new test playlist with just 100 random songs, no other rules. Some results: 1) Coincidentally, right off the bat, the songs it chose were near exact to my other playlist I actually use with similar rules that also just filters out recently played. Seems like all playlists share the same seed. 2) Reopening Google Play Tab and resyncing produced the same results, despite the instructions saying this should reset the seed. 3) I right clicked Chrome in windows and exited. Reopened and resynced. Same results
I do see different songs every so often, so I'm not sure what the the triggering difference is that makes it select a new seed. Maybe a computer restart does the trick, so when I don't it stays the same?
Either way, if it's not a large tweak, I feel like it would be really nice to select a new seed every sync a bit more reliably? Is there a fundamental reason it reuses the seed so much?
Thanks!