What do I have to do to get the shuffle to behave?

[nivekiankollection]

Occasionally the shuffle gets stuck on an album...
Often it favors an artist...
Sometimes it repeats songs...
I have 7,774 different audio files with a play time of 26 days and 10 hours, why do I hear the same songs every day?
I don't exit the program, I don't pause or stop or even ask it to play specific songs... why am I hearing this song again?
It's not set to shuffle rated songs over others.
It's not set to repeat.
It's not set to shuffle albums.
It's set for different artist at the moment because random has shown it can not be trusted.

The auto dj does okay with a few of these issues... though, the question now becomes, why doesn't the dj start when the application starts or re-starts? What makes the shuffle command so different from the auto dj? Do I have to go through all those steps just to enjoy music?

[frankz]

Your comment doesn't track.

Occasionally the shuffle gets stuck on an album...
Often it favors an artist...
Sometimes it repeats songs...

Actually, it does none of those things.

If you start MB and shuffle a playlist or your library, a Playing Track list is created.  Assuming each song in the playlist/library exists in the playlist/library only once, each song is only in that list once.

If you've set MB up properly for what you want to actually do with MB (Edit->Edit Preferences->Now Playing...clear playing tracks list and current playing track on restart is OFF), that list is not changed when you restart MB.  The last track is in the past, the next track in the list of 7774 is queued, you hit play and you're off to the races.

If you're restarting the process by going back to the beginning and re-queueing all of the tracks, why are you doing that?  You already have a list where all of the tracks are only represented once and will only be played once until the end of the list.

Asking as a friend