Jun
03
Download today’s show here! MC20190603.mp3 [40.0 01:14:57 64kbps]
A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Episode 707. Apple’s 2019 World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) Keynote announcements. New Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR. macOS Catalina. iOS 13. watchOS 6. tvOS 13. HomePod. New iPod Touch. Done with HBO Apple TV Channel. Refresh your old Mac with an SSD. Can I get pseudo random shuffle?
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Adam,
I appreciate your rundown on WWDC 2019. And, I thought I was the only one having trouble with the shuffle feature in Apple Music. Good to Know, I’m not the only one. Your idea for apple to alter the algorithm is good, that may be the solution.
Hi Adam,
Thanks for the breezy, yet detailed and informative podcast!
I’m just writing with a comment on the shuffle algorithm. As one of my first Swift learning projects I built a player that shuffled by pulling randomly from the collection and not repeating until the collection is exhausted. It’s been a while since I played with it, but it had been working reasonably well. I’m a current Apple Music subscriber and spend less continuous time listening to my collection. So the motivation for shuffling is reduced.
I just made the source code freely available in GitHub in case somebody wants to use it to build an app that addresses this problem. It was previously working, but will need a Swift language upgrade, better testing, and probably many enhancements before releasing it on the world. I’d be happy if somebody else finds it useful.
Here’s the GitHub URL:
https://github.com/wijjo/mixtery
Cheers,
Steve
Adam,
I’ve replayed your “guest comments” from Paul from the UK several times on upgrading components in an old Mac. I have a MacBook Pro 15″, 6.2 mid-2010 model. The beachball has been driving me crazy.
I took my old MacBook to a local MacHQ shop and they ran a free diagnostic. That was just to make sure nothing else was going wrong.
Paul’s story got me to check online costs of an SSD hard drive and upgrading my RAM. Looks like this is just as easy as Paul said. I like the guys at MacHQ, but they wanted more than $150 labor total for the RAM and SSD Drive upgrades. OK, they EARN that, but I’ve built and maintained old PC desktops and towers, so I’m not afraid of plugging stuff. BIG thanks for including Paul’s story and the helpful links you provided.
Keep Podcasting! I’ll keep listening.
-Bruce
Hi Adam,
Greetings from Ireland!
Just listening to the caller (Brian) who had an issue with shuffling music in playlists.
I’m having this problem also, and I think it’s more to it than random just being random.
I could have a playlist of 100 songs, press shuffle, but my phone will only play the same 10-20 songs in that playlist on repeat. No matter how many times I skip to the next track it will always chose one of the 10-20 songs. To introduce a different song (from the same playlist) to the “shuffle” I need to manually click on that track to play it, then it will join the other 10-20 songs in the random shuffle.
I thought it may have something to do with which tracks were downloaded to the phone taking precedence to tracks that had yet to be downloaded from the cloud, or something to do with how highly I had rated the tracks, but that didn’t appear to be the case.
I don’t have the same issue using iTunes (RIP) on the Mac, just with my iPhone.
Thanks!
Alan
P.S. I love the show! :)
Greetings from the humid South!
I just stumbled upon your podcast and am enjoying it.
Just wanted to add my comments about the ‘shuffling’ issue in Apple Music. I really enjoy shuffling music in the various playlists that Apple presents in ‘For You’, etc. Very often I just select ‘shuffle’ and expect to hear the entire playlist without hearing a song repeated… and that clearly does not work that way anymore, if it ever did. I so often hear repeats and it just drives me crazy!
Sure hope this is somehow addressed by Apple because it is clearly an issue.
Thanks!
Todd (in Alabama)