"shuffle"/random function on android is broken to the point of being unusable.

[tehohn]

For some time now (weeks at least) this has been an issue, "shuffle" used to work fine in the past, but has now become entirely broken on the Android app.
In both windows and android apps/programs the play queue has a 50 (or thereabout) song limit. This in itself is a rather ridiculously low number, but I can (barely) accept if that is a technical or performance limitation by itself. Even though it does mean any random list will start repeating itself in a rather short ammount of time.

That said the above is not the pressing issue, that would be the fact that if my playlist has more then 50 songs in it, then whenever I try to activate shuffle, either by the crossing arrows button, or the big green button marked "shuffle", the result is the same. The play que will be populated by a random pick of the 50 FIRST songs in the playlist ONLY.

EVERY SINGLE TIME.
I have playlists that are up to 1900 songs long, as I tend to sort by genre. This means if i want to listen to a random selection of songs from a given playlist, which is almost allways. (I don't normally care to listen to songs in album order. I wants some variation.) Then as many as 1850 of the songs in my list will NEVER appear. Only a pick of the same few songs on the list. Every. Single. Time.
This particuar bug does not appear in the windows program, which at least picks a batch of 50 random songs from around the point of the song you start from. IF you sort by title, then this pick is fairly random, not by album or artist. that is silly, but at least acceptable behaviour, on windows.
and yes it is a bug. this is a problem. the android app used to work fine, and now it is broken.
The android app doesn't even have the option of sorting songs in a list by title. for some reason (why not? makes no sense.)
I mostly use Spotify on my phone or tablet. often in the car or otherwise on the move, with no access to my computer. I am getting really tiered of hearing the same songs, over and over again. and there is nothing I can do about it. The only viable solution to fix this issue would be to jailbreak my phone. find an older version of your app from a third party. uninstall the present app and install the older one instead. then disabling updates. to be able to return to a point where this was not an issue.
That is a terrible solution both for me and spotify as a company. I should not have to resort to that.
There is no excuse for making the android app shuffle function entirely unusable. Shuffle is a basic, simple, fundamental feature of any music player. A mistake has clearly been made. So re-do, and make it right.
Otherwise I like Spotify, I have been a long time satisfied customer and have been more then happy to have a payed account. I want to give you my money. But this is a dealbreaker. if this issue is not fixed I will have to cancel my account and look for competing alternatives.

[Joe]

Shuffle has been a work in progress as long as I can remember - they're probably still working on it. The queue actually holds 100 tracks currently and further tracks are added one at a time as the playlist progresses. I've no idea how the algorith works but I guess that there's every chance that you will start hearing repeats after track 100 as subsequent music must be added randomly.

You can sort tracks within a playlist - just follow the steps here.

"Jailbreak"? Haven't seen that word since my days on iphone. If you really think that installing an older version will give you the functionality you seek, it's simply a case of downloading the .apk file and installing it. You will need to enable the android setting to allow installation from unknown sources first. I urge caution as any unofficial download may have been tampered with.

[tehohn · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the response, now we're getting somewhere!

I finally figured out where the sort meny is, but only partly thanks to the guide you linked and partly becuase of pure chance.

The guide is misleading and should be updated.

If you follow the instructions:

1. open a playlist and

2. look for a button with three stripes.

You will find there is none... It doesn't exist. No matter where you look. And if you scroll down the list, to see more songs, which is what I always do. Why wouldn't I? It will never appear. Only if you squeese in a step 1.1 while at the very top of a list, scroll the list up. untill a record cover appears. then as step 1.2 , you have to continue scrolling even further up.  (Why would you do that? I only did once by pure accident) Only THEN does the button in question appear.

Even so though the shuffle algoritm still appears to be always picking songs from the top part of the playlist ONLY. For some nonsensical reason. Now I can at least have a few options on how to sort the list and thereby altering the top part of possible songs somewhat. Basically as long as artist, title or album always starts with the letter A it can play. So stil fairly broken.

But there does seem to be one option that might break this pattern though. But I'm not sure what it does, what does "sort by Custom" mean? And how exactly do you customize it? I haven't been able to find an answer to that.

EDIT: I now also found another option, "Sort by Recently added". So there are actually two ways to bypass the terrible shuffle sorting. The shuffle algorithm should pick songs from the entire playlist, regardless. not just the top part of the current sort. that makes no sense. But at least there are workarounds now.

[Joe]

"Custom" returns the playlist to its original order.

[Mikael_T]

Used to be able to play shuffle on any folder, meaning playing shuffle on all playlists in folder. I am so anoid that this been removed since beginning of 2017, when will we see shuffle on folders again?

[Lozypants]

Im using the Android app too and find i have the exact same problem- its very frustrating to say the least and has been a problem for too long now.
Interestingly enough, iv found the shuffle option works perfectly if you play it offline.
I only discovered this because im a frequent flyer and found that the shuffle results are perfect when your phone is on flight safe mode.
Obviously this isn't an ideal solution as pairing the device via wifi then becomes impossible and your phone itself becomes uncontactable.
But it at least generates a decent song-queue and then you can turn flight safe mode off again to resume normal functions of your handset.