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!

[DAF555]

This is really not much better, all that happened was that the system added some other songs to play and now I´ve heard them more than i wished also. The "improvement" was only on my PC at home, on my Iphone it´s still as lousy as before.

I think it´s embarrassing that it hasn´t been solved yet, the problem has been known for years now.

I don´t think that the solution lies in more complicated algorithms, it obviously isn´t working.

Couldn´t you just add a function that hides the played songs until the list is played to the end. I believe that would solve the whole problem, even when using the first algorithm.

[kbrooksc]

I've noticed a bit of improvement, but it's to the point with me that I deleted the songs that kept playing just because I was tired of them. 

[SR_Penny]

I still haven't noticed an real improvement on my iPhone. As for the desktop versions I use (Mac at home and Win at work), they've got worse - a lot worse - following recent updates.

[Peter__]

I think it has got better on desktop for me, although this bug drives me insane!

http://community.spotify.com/t5/Bugs/iOS-Desktop-Queuing-Track-In-Playlist-Causes-a-Queue-skip-plays...

[_daniel_]

Hi there

I felt equally annoyed by Spotify’s shuffle play and also had the feeling, the same songs were played over and over again. So I created a playlist of 50 songs and conducted a little experiment:

I shuffle played all 50x songs and to my surprise each song was only played ONCE until each single song of the playlist was played. After that the shuffle function started all over again and shuffle played the 50x songs all over again. In total I repeated this experiment four times and to my surprise it worked perfectly. No song was played twice within a 50x-song-cycle.

But because my feeling told me, something must be wrong, I continued with other experiments. I hibernated my laptop but still, the shuffle play worked perfectly.

Eventually I found the problem (at least what I consider to be MY problem). I listened to 25 songs out of my 50 song playlist and switched off Spotify. When I switched it back on again Spotify would still remember which song I played when I switched it off. However, Spotify forgot which 25 songs I played before so the whole shuffle play started all over again, also playing the 25 songs it had already played.

The same happened when I played a song from another playlist, artist or album. Spotify simply doesn’t remember the songs it had already played.

To be honest I’m not sure whether this means Spotify should remember the songs it has already played or not, or whether there should be an option to switch that function on or off. For me personally it means, shuffle works just fine in a lab environment. But in real life, at least in my life, where I interact and randomly choose to listen here and there and then return and forward and go back again, it means it is highly depressing and frustrating. So remembering the songs which had been played would just solve the problem.

Thx

Daniel

PS. Unfortunately I cannot upload my Excel file of my little experiment to show my results, but I can send it to anyone who is interested and wants to check the data and results.