What the program shows me is that it's our perceptions that make it seems like we're getting clusters and/or combs of artists. When as few as three songs by the same artist or the same album come close enough together, we start thinking "Jeez, this player is playing nothing but Metallica today!".

But what this graph shows is that it's not only expected, but it's actually common for clusters of artists and even albums to appear. And when you see the boxed clusters on the screen (nicely done, by the way), you can see that it's just a brief concentration that's not much different than the other songs in the shuffle.

The only reason we all keep thinking it's something wrong with the shuffle is because the empeg is the first player we've owned that lets us hear this many different artists in one place. So we just assume that having that many artists means we won't hear the same artist close together. But when you look at the distribution graph, we see it's still inevitable.

Too cool. Great work, thank you SO much!