Windows 7: Music Shuffle Plays some tracks A Lot and some tracks Never

When I select several bands or albums to play from my music collection, and select SHUFFLE, some bands/albums get played over and over again while some don't get played at all. I don't usually have the time, or ambition to create a custom playlist every time I want to hear particular bands or albums. It seems that if I select 5 different albums, select Add to Now Playing, and each album is containing the same number of songs, statistically I should be hearing a proportional number of songs from each album. But this is not even close to the case and is totally annoying! I've heard the same song replayed multiple times before a single track is played once. HELP PLEASE!

BTW- Almost all of my music is unrated so that shouldn't be a factor.

I am afraid that shuffle is not truly random. It uses and algorithm for what get played next and that can be determined by sponsored artists, number of plays, tracks, etc.

the very same thing has driven me crazy with iTunes for years. With over 18,000 songs I dont want to make 14,000 play lists.

I found in iTunes that the way the songs are sorted has some effect (ie If I pick genre, or number of skips, etc) helps

Sorry I cant be more helpful

I'm dealing with the same thing.

My mp3s are culled from CDs and are all individual tracks and should not have any sponsorship issues.

I have 21,000 songs, which Itunes says is somewhere around 45 days of playback without hearing the same song. So, if you don't play back a lot, you might go years without hearing a song. On the other hand, you might hear any given song twice within relatively few hours.

I don't know how to get around it given the algorithm, whatever it is.

Normally, I just play "shuffle" from the entire 21,000 song library.

However, I also have 10 playlists, strictly by genre, (blues, country, Hawaiian, etc) and resorting to a playlist may be the only way to ensure you have a chance of hearing any given song. The sum of my playlists equals my library. The playlists are just replications of hard drive folders.

Isn't or wasn't there an Itunes setting that would force playback of EVERY song before a single song could be repeated? That would probably be even worse.

I'm not positive but I believe you are correct. I wonder if there is a way to force WMC/WMP to do precisely what you described? Since my mood dictates the 4 to 10 albums I select at any given time, forbidding playback of a track before unplayed tracks run would be very welcomed by me!

Does anybody know how to make this happen?

You'll probably need to copy the songs to a new folder, scramble them, create a playlist. That may be your best option.