Remember last month when I said I had found a solution to re-implementing "Play higher rated songs more often" in iTunes 11? Well, it turns out my solution kind of sucks in a couple of ways:- Let's say you haven't bought music in a while, or haven't rated too many things with five stars lately. That "Recent 210 ★★★★★" playlist might have a couple hundred tracks in it that aren't really very "recent". You might choose to also limit that playlist (and the other "recent" playlists) to "Date added in the last 12 months" to keep only recent-ish highly-rated tracks in it -- but now the carefully-chosen ratios will be out of whack, and your recent five-star songs might actually end up being played less often than your more-numerous recent three-star songs.
Often, even though the Mini-Player is set to shuffle from the "75% Recent 25% Library" playlist folder, it will play six or ten songs in a row by the same band! All of these tracks are present in the playlist, but with a thousand tracks in the playlist it's statistically impossible for this to happen as often as it does if they were truly being chosen randomly. I have no idea what it's doing. The queued tracks are in non-alphabetical order. The chosen column for sorting in the sub-playlists doesn't seem to affect it, but it's hard to test.
It's as if iTunes went out of its way to do the stupidest possible thing.
Free Sgt. Star: Army Ignores FOIA Request for Artificial Intelligence Records
"There's no use trying to talk. No human sound can stand up to this."
"Why would anybody do that? I have no idea."
Bob Larson's International School of Exorcism®: