the new shuffle!

[harrycaul]

Bravo on the shuffle changes; I've been waiting a long time for this. One question though. The news article says: "you'll never hear the same song again until at least half of the rest of the songs in the playlist play through." So my question is, does this slow down playing on large playlists, or after a lot of songs have been played?

[MarcSRS]

No, it just eats up gobs and scads of memory by allocating a huge array of all the songs you've listened to "lately".

Okay, not really. I dunno how it works but it shouldn't slow you down. It's prolly just a fixed-size array that contains the last n amount of songs, and every time you listen to another, it pops one off the top, shifts em down, and puts that one on. When it's shuffling, it makes sure that the song it's shuffling to isn't in that array. If it did work like that, the amount of time would be negligible (and fixed).

Bleh. :-)