How Does Winamp's "Shuffle" work?
 

What sorta pattern does it use?It cant be completely random, when ever i use it,it sometimes sticks to the same beat(hiphop) but a different artist over the track. Or it stays with the same artist and a different song/beat.

Go into options, and you can switch the percentage of its suffle.
sounds to me you % is really low....

I need to try that, cuz mine definitely doesn't play the whole list once before repeating songs on shuffle

Moved from Nonsense.

There is no such thing as 'completely random' on a computer.

--titled philosophy
is there such a thing as 'completely random' anywhere?
/-- tilted philosophy

Maybe you can take a look at this for a discussion of X11AMP's (xmms, winamp-look-a-like) shuffle algorithm:
click here

nice find on that link Silvy - an answer you can actually use

I wish there was something a little more random for the suffle feature. It seems to me, that the random fuction plays in a set pattern. I will commonly hear songs that I have recently played, but the songs I rarely play will never come up on random.

There used to be a winamp program that "fixed" the shuffle problem. I can't remember the name of it. The user could rate the current song being played. Those with a high value were played more often than those with a low value.

It was a really neat learning algorithm.

Shame I can't remember the name of it (and a quick google search doesn't reveal anything promising).

I sort my playlist with the 'randomize' option a few times and then play straight through from the top of the list, instead of just using 'shuffle' on a list sorted in order. It's much better, I rarely ever get the same sequence of songs.

I've found this method to be the best way as well when dealing with albums thrown together on a playlist.

http://www.synapseai.com/index.asp

But it really didn't work too well for me. It hasn'be been developed on for quite some time.

as they said above. Shuffle the playlist, then play straight through. Turn off shuffle on the winamp window.

I had WinAmp play the same song twice in a row when on random (20 Gig library). At the time, that convinced me it truly was random. What do I know...