Music coincidence
I'm listening to music while entering stories into the SH database.
Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer's "Farewell to Bitterroot Valley" came on; I haven't heard it very much and don't know it well, but I like it.
The next song to come up in the random sequence, picked from among 1750 songs on the playlist, was Fred Small's "Heart of the Appaloosa." Which contains the line "They fled into the Bitterroot, an army at their heels."
At first I thought this had to be pure coincidence. Then I realized that I had added "Appaloosa"'s lyrics in the Lyrics tab of the iTunes info window.
So now I don't know. There've been persistent rumors for years that iTunes's shuffle play does segues sometimes, but I'd always assumed that was mostly due to people being really good at pattern-matching and selective observation.
But in the Preferences, there's a slider for "Smart Shuffle," which lets you "change the likelihood of hearing sequential songs by the same artist or from the same album (when shuffle is on)." I have it set to the center (default) setting, which is labeled "random"; but I don't know exactly what that means.
Anyway. It seems extremely unlikely that iTunes looked at the title for one song, picked one word from it, searched the lyrics in all the songs I have that have lyrics attached, found that word (probably the only other occurrence of the word in my entire music library), and played the song containing it.
But it's just barely possible.
But it's probably just coincidence. Still, a nice coincidence.
And now I will stop babbling and go back to entering stories.