Your Ideas At Work: Shuffle Improvements

[meahtenoha]

The Community Ideas Board isn’t just about requesting new features. It’s also about improving the features already in Spotify.

Take our shuffle algorithm for instance.

The Idea “Implement an actual shuffle function” by Community user @RoninTheOrigina  gathered over 850 votes.  Users were vocal in their comments about what they wanted (and didn’t want) when it came to shuffling playlists.

We then passed this knowledge on and our teams got to work.

The result: an improved shuffling algorithm that avoids playing a couple songs from an artist too close together.

If you’re thinking, “that sounds kind of vague, what are these improvements” then fret no more.

Spotify’s @lukasP  has written an extensive blog post on how we gathered user feedback on Shuffle, analyzed their comments, took a hard look at our previous algorithm and found the best way to bring the improvements users wanted.

We’re aware this doesn’t fix all shuffling issues forever. Rest assured we are still working on this though.  You’ll also see the new algorithm in other clients other than desktop soon.

Now go hit shuffle on your favorite playlist and reap the benefits of your hard work clicking that Kudos button.

Enjoy!

[chipples]

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@_daniel_ wrote:

Sorry Jay,

but it seems you haven't read ANY of the above messages in this thread. Why should anyone bother to answer you?

Thx for trying to help anyway.

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JayLB was replying to the post immediately before his, by banjodog1966:

"How do I take Shuffle off??

Please"

Perhaps it's you that needs to read more carefully.

[ratnama]

Exactly my opinion. It is pretty obvious that some of the songs/artists from a playlist are prefered and some specific ones are almost never played.

Maybe I'm wrong but it seem the algorithm is set to prioritizing selected artists (monetising reasons?).

It even looks like an error. I intentionally tried to skip throught the playlist radio 4 times the number of all the songs inside and one of the artist has not been played even once.

[_daniel_]

Sorry Chipples, of course you're right. Didn't see that message, my bad.

[martincla]

Surely if they created a playlist Sort By feature which was randomised then we could just play that playlist all the way through. At the moment there is a Custom sort by feature, but all it does is put a playlist in a random order once but doesnt re-order it when you click on the custom button again, plus it sorts it in a silly order with about 5 songs of the same artist in a row.

What i would like to see is a sort by feature thats called randomised where by it shuffles the entire playlist rarandomly, i can then go through and play the whole playlist in full without using the shuffle feature. This elmininates the re-playing of songs.

If i switch playlists i can simply either remember the last song that was played and start from there or i can re-sort the playlist in a random order again, yes this will potentially create same song listening again but surely no-where near as bad as the so called shuffle feature they have presented us with.

At the moment i am sorting my songs alphabetically and playing the playlist all the way through, when i switch playlists i just randomly scroll through it and select a song and carry on from there. This solves the repeat issue but theres another problem in that Spotify doesnt let you save your sort preferences, so everytime i want to play a playlist i have to re-sort it from its default last added mode to alphabetically.

Can we get a setting where it saves your sort prefrences as this would im sure make many people's lives easier.
Just ideas 🙂
Thanks 🙂

[WaxwingSlain]

That is precisely what I'm looking for. Thanks for the suggestion.