How is the shuffle on this thing?

Topic.  I’ve read that a lot of players have issues with heavily favoring some songs over others.

I don’t have the Fuze (yet), but I believe it’s shuffle is exactly the same as the Clip (which I do have).

Not sure about favoring certain tracks, but the Clip really has a “random” feature as opposed to a true shuffle.  In other words, when a song ends, the next one is randomly selected from the entire list of songs.  This allows the possiblility of hearing a given track more than once.  It also means you can’t skip back to the previous song.  The Clip will just make another random pick in that case.

A true shuffle on the other hand, builds a randomly ordered playlist and then just plays it back from start to finish.  That way songs don’t get repeated and you can always skip backward/forward in the same order as playback.

In practice, with a good sized playlist I haven’t really had any complaints with the Clip’s random feature, but I hope they eventually implement a true shuffle.  I believe people that frequently use shorter playlists have more trouble with a track being played more than once.

Like I said, I’m pretty sure all this applies to the Fuze as well.  I’m sure someone will correct me if not.:wink:

Message Edited by Skinjob on 04-22-2008 06:29 PM

The Fuze is not truely random like the Clip. For instance, given 20 songs, the Fuze will play through them randomly but will play each one roughly the same amount as the others. I did not keep track to see if the Fuze is randomizing a playlist of every song then randomizing again when each song has been played once, but that would not be a surprise to me. I’ve also tried playing previous tracks and the Fuze was able to play back the last 10 songs that it played on shuffle. I did not try a higher number of songs.

Thanks.  So no real problems with skipping tracks you’ve recently heard/never playing a large number of songs?

@sawjai wrote:
The Fuze is not truely random like the Clip. For instance, given 20 songs, the Fuze will play through them randomly but will play each one roughly the same amount as the others. I did not keep track to see if the Fuze is randomizing a playlist of every song then randomizing again when each song has been played once, but that would not be a surprise to me. I’ve also tried playing previous tracks and the Fuze was able to play back the last 10 songs that it played on shuffle. I did not try a higher number of songs.

That’s excellent news!  I thought I had read a post somewhere that it was the same as the Clip.  Maybe it was in the original FW?  Anyway, thanks for the info!

So far no problems with a large amount of files on shuffle.

I do believe that it was changed in a firmware update because I think the Fuze did not remember previously played songs on shuffle in earlier firmwares.