6 Reasons the iPod's shuffle feature isn't truly random

Sometimes my iPod pulls a Pandora on me and plays songs that sound a lot alike, one right after the other. For example, as I let the shuffle play, "Friday Night" by Lily Allen, "8 Easy Steps" by Alanis Morissette and "Redneck Woman" by Gretchen Wilson, all of which sound a lot like each other, played consecutively.

For example, I was listening (briefly) to "Prince Ali" from the Aladdin Soundtrack, skipped the song and the next song was a song by Prince.

If I listen to a song all the way to the end, chances are another song from the same album will come up "randomly." For example, on the "Who is Jill Scott" album, the intro to "He Loves Me" and the actual song are split into two tracks. I was grooving to the intro and miraculously the second part of the song played directly after the first even though it was in shuffle mode and the songs are not paired together in the metadata.

If I listen to a Missy Elliott track that I like all the way through, but I don't like the next song, I can guarantee that another Missy Elliott song will appear within the next five songs.

If I am listening to a song in a genre, I can expect another song from that genre will come up fairly soon. For example, I listened to a song from the Dreamgirls soundtrack and skipped the next couple of songs. Magically, a song from the Hairspray soundtrack played within 5 songs, even though I have only 108 songs in the "Soundtrack" genre or .02 percent of the total number of songs on my iPod.

There are many obscure songs in my iPod that rarely EVER come up in the shuffle including, but not limited to, "Are You That Somebody" by Gossip, "Auf Asche" by Franz Ferdinand, "If its Magic" by Stevie Wonder, the theme to "Doug," and "I'm So L.A." by MYNX.