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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.

 

shuffle algorithm.png

 

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!

 

111 Comments
LaPoiscaille

This is important, I'm truly wondering how many of my fellow spotify users already died in a car accident while repeatedly pressing the forward button in an attempt to listen to something else. What I know is that I'm spending way too much time fiddling with my phone in the car  because of spotify's shuffle implementation.

 

 

If you're not convinced that there is an issue with your implementation of shuffle, please send me instructions for accessing my spotify history (song played, time of playing, shuffle activated, etc) in any format. I'll do a statistical analysis and will tell you the probability that it occurs under a true uniform distribution. 

 

We do _not_ want a "clever" (I mean the quotes) algorithm, we want a uniform random distribution.


Best regards, I hope you will consider my feedback this time.

 

 

kalzor

I did a test today.

 

Every 7 times I pressed the next key I would get the same song.  I once even got the same song back to back.  It's only on the playlist once! I think your shuffle agorithem is broken.

There are so many threads on this problem and yet - nothing... crazy really.

Aasatytti

Hi!

 

I just now started using Spotify free, and came across this question: Is random/shuffle option off for free users? It seems that the "random" option is not random at all, but plays songs on my playlist on its spesific order. I did read this thread over and everyone seems to complain that the Shuffle only plays same songs over and over. But in my case it plays all the songs in the same order they are on the playlist. ...Why is that??

If I upgrade, and start paying actual money, then will it at least TRY to play songs at random? (And yes, I do know wherethe shuffle button is.) This does not really make me eager to pay, when I read comments how the random is not random at all, not even for paying users.

 

I wish I still had Winamp. -__-

DMSWON
Shuffle feature is so broken that I resorted to splitting 500 song playlist into 4 in hopes it would go "deeper" into the catalog. It still favors a tiny fraction of each playlist. Now I just turn shuffle off and play songs in order with list sorted by song title. It sucks though because I have to alternate through lists on playback. When adding new songs I have to decide which list to put it in. Also if there are duplicates or covers of a song you hear them twice in a row. Why are you making this so hard?! There must be something related to royalties!