Headphone Heights

Posted by Nirmala (A) on May 01, 2014 at 18:14:46

In Reply to: RE: How to have perfectly random playback on the Altmann Tera Player posted by Nirmala on April 29, 2014 at 20:14:53

There is word that Charles has updated the algorithm used in more recent Tera players. You can probably check with him to see if your unit has the new algorithm. If a Tera is using the newer algorithm, then the instructions in the post above become irrelevant. The new algorithm by itself should do a pretty good job of playing music randomly.

A while back on Headfi, I shared what Charles was thinking of doing with the new algorithm. I am not sure if he did use the one he told me about, but here it is again:
Charles is working on another algorithm. This one takes the random number and divides it by the number of tracks/files. Results of the division are discarded and then any remainder is used to select the track or folder. (i.e. with 22 tracks and a random number generated of 135: 135 divided by 22 is 6 with a remainder of 3. So track #3 would be selected.) Sounds to me like it should work much better, although there still might be a slight weighting. However, it would be many orders of magnitude less than the weighting of the current algorithm. For example with 100 folders, some would get 2 out of 256 selections and some would get 3 out of 256 selections, or with 20 folders, some would get 12 out of 256 and some would get 13 out of 256. Still pretty random especially compared to the current algorithm, and it would be perfectly random anytime it was selecting a folder/track out of a group that has 2,4,8,16,32,64 or 128 folders/tracks.

Edits: 05/01/14