maybe i'll elaborate a little on what i'm doing here. 🙂
i'm commissioned to make a 'random jukebox'. meaning: i have 272 .wavfiles, that need to be controlled by a single pushbutton. push the button, machine selects wavfile for you.
but with these conditions:
- all files must have played exactly once before a new cycle of 272 starts, like drawing from a hat.
- the start of a new cycle cannot match the end of the previous one, since that would mean a repetition as well.
what i did now is to have two pools of 136 files. i first select all 136 files in pool A at random, then switch to pool B and so on and so forth. it kind of narrows down the randomness a little, being two big blocks and all, but the upside is it keeps any repetition of a song at least 136 songs apart, which seemed like a good tradeoff.
so if by 'randomizing an array' you mean filling it with random numbers, that just moves my problem - i would still need all different values in the array, and i would still need a vanilla[urn]. which is what is causing the hiccups.
if however you mean there's a method of keeping all values in an array but shuffle their positions/indexes around.. that might be a lifesaver. i looked at [array random] but the help file on that is lacking somewhat, can't seem to get that to work.