In reply to:

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And if you want to figure out odds, you should look at the odds for 3 songs by any given artist

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Well, in your case, the odds of any three NIN songs coming up at the beginning of a new shuffle is a mere 1 / 364,000. The calculations get more complicated when you start talking about three songs by NIN showing up in a row anywhere in the middle of a playlist, but they drop dramatically, to somewhere around 1 / 60 (not entirely sure of that number, but it should be close).

In reply to:

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not for three specific tracks

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But in his case it was three specific tracks. I am assuming that those are the only three versions of "Polly" that he has on the Empeg. The order doesn't matter, and I accounted for that, but it had to be specifically those three songs and no other Nirvana ones.

An interesting statistic. Assuming you have 85 NIN songs, and you randomized just them, what are the odds that they would play in the correct order as if you hadn't shuffled them at all? 2.8 X 10^128 !

This is all assuming of course that it is truly random and the way the Empeg does it isn't, as Bruno said, "buggered".