The random mode on the compact flash is HORRIBLE! I've 512 songs on the card, set on random, but the stereo keeps playing the same 30 over and over and over when on random play it seems....The should have done a better job on the software for that.

 

thats a first year model for ya

 

You know, Apple had a similar problem with the iPod. People kept complaining that it would play two songs by the same artist right after each other, or repeat songs. This was because they used a true random....

They ended up switching to a "smart random," and wrote the song to "randomly" pick songs that were different enough from each other to please the people who couldn't grasp (or just didn't like) the idea of a true mathematical random shuffle.

 

just list them in random order and play through them...start at a different song, etc.

Think outside the box!

 

Since teh 2.8x versions, Winamp has had a setting where you could vary how "random" the random choices are. For example, if you have a 2,000 song playlist, but you keep skipping tracks until you hear another heavy metal song, the software would wisen up and play heavy metal (or same album or same band) songs more often. I'm sure this is a similar problem, though you just don't have a setting to adjust the variance.

 

Hit the friggin little button on the steering wheel!!! GEEESH!!

 

One can never achieve true randomness using a deterministic system like a computer chip (which knows only 1 and 0). True randomness are things like flipping a coin or picking a card out of a shuffled deck.
All computer systems use some sort of "pseudo" random generator (PRNG) to simulate randomness -- so if the G picks the same songs when in "random" mode, it is mostly a bug in this PRNG algorithm.
Its an interesting and complex field of study - I am sure Infiniti didn't think it was that big a deal and chose a crappy (& cheap to implement) algo