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!

[tntuof]

In my experience the suffle has gone from bad to worse, sometimes when starting a playlist from a track it just revovels about that track and seems unable to go deeper into the playlist! Like it doesent know the whole playlist when starting from a song?

[rfitenite]

 Is this ever going to be fixed? This post was posted a year and a half ago and people are still complaining about it? I just recently had the EXACT SAME SONG played back to back. Same artist, song, version, album. This issue is obviously not fixed and your algorithm needs work, to say the least.

[Colach]

I have the solution to the Spotify shuffle problem.

The problem with algorithms is that they eventually repeat themselves if there is not a checking service, which stops a track that has been played in a list to be played again. But, this solution would need to log all the lists on spotify, and would create an huge amount of data.

Instead of this Spotify should

Use something similar to the following. Take the number of songs in a list as the entry point then let a calculator multiply this figure with the current time (what the computer clock stands at in terms of minutes and seconds) in terms of minutes, then multiply again with the figure the seconds are at. This would provide the real random as the clock is not repetitive. 

So let this be the formula for the shuffle algorithm:

(numbers of songs in a list) X (current minute count on the computer) X (current seconds count) = A real shuffle!

Actually use what ever, but let the local computer clock be involved in the shuffle algorithm. If something in the algorithm isnt changing songs will be repeated. An algorithm need to be alive - the clock is the answer.

[swearm]

I really does not want any advanced algorith. I want my spotify playlist to play randomly, just pick a new song completely random in my playlist. You should implement two different styles of randomness. Shuffle = using the algorithm, AND RANDOM = completely random based upon a completely random "dice", pls do this!

I have playlists with hundreds of songs, but still Spotify keeps playing like only 30 of them!

[Colach]

Sure, but what is random for you? It has to be created/programmed.

The question is how this should be coded.