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!

[Peter__]

I'm not 100% sure, does Spotify save your play queue when you exit (which is essentially what would be needed to implement this)?

[kjbllc]

yes in some form it does, because it will start where you left off, but I think it goes back to some original 100 songs to shuffle or something. liek I said I have 9,000 songs and it repeats way toooooo often, I should not hear the same song for weeks , I would think. other than that I am very happy with the product. 

 I think if we just keep posting it will happen

[_daniel_]

@Peter: Not sure about the Play Queue feature, not using it at all. If I'm looking for new music I shift it to several playlists of mine and when I'm actually listening to music I only use my playlists. And in those the songs which were played before shutting off spotify are definitely not saved.

@Kjbllc: From my experiment Spotify played ALL 50 songs in my playlist just ONE single time, so the shuffle play perfectly worked (as I mentioned, I didn't expect that result either). And I repeated this several times and to my surprise Spotify worked correctly each single time.

However, Spotify has to run the whole time and need NOT to be switched off EVER, otherwise it starts all over again (you can also never change the playlist or listen to something else).

Would be glad if someone else tried similar experiments and would share the results.

[kjbllc]

I don't usually switch off, or change playlist as it is so big, I do turn my computer off, but on restart it leaves off where the last song played was. 

  I might work on a 50 song playlist, better than a 9k one, I think it picks out a hundred or so songs and shuffles them, so the next day it might play those same 100 songs. 

 I play music all day, from 7 am till about 8pm. in  a week I will hear quite a number of repeats, but it does seem to repeat with predictability , 

 like it gets into a section of my playlist with hendrix, and I will hear hendrix a lot for a week, then it hits some other artist section. 

this is what leads me to believe it takes sections of a play list and shuffles them , then maybe moves on. 

 I have taken to putting up the paly que, and fast forwarding by a couple of hundred songs to get to some I have not heard in a while. that seems to work for the most part, \

 but it also gets back to the heard many times songs sooner than later, 

  If the suffle worked the way I wanted it to, I would only hear a repeat every 61 days if I play music 10 hours a day

so it falls far short of that, It can't go 2 days without a repeat, of the same song, 

It may be too complicated to be able to so it with a large amount of playlists , I don't know anything about programming,

 What would work for me would be play every 51th or 83th song, it would naturally ( I think) never repeat  a song ..  but thats just me 

 It seems most people would like to hear the same songs over and over again, judging by the radio and the kind of live music that you find in bars and such. 

 and as I have said, all in all i like the service a lot, I can work around the repeats, 

 In some cases , I just eliminate the songs that repeat, or whole artists, which does solve the problem. 

 for the most part I am happy with hearing a song once every year ..  with all the good music out there, why listen to what you already have memorized?

[_daniel_]

Exactly, so your experience seems to fit into the results of my experiment.

After restarting your computer Spotify starts with the last song you played before leaving. However, and this is what my experiment showed, Spotify does not remember which songs you played before.

So lets say you have 9,000 songs in one playlist and you played 250 songs of those yesterday, finishing with song X. Today, Spotify will start with song X and shuffle play all 9,000 songs again instead of continuing with the remaining 8,750. So the 250 songs you already heard are in the new shuffle and can therefore be repeated.

If you switch off your computer each day, Spotify will start with a new shuffle routine each day, never remembering the songs it had already played.

For me the trouble is rather that I have several playlists which I use daily for different activities like dinner with guests, chill out, work out etc. So I might work out now for an hour or so and afterwards I want to relax for an hour and then I have guests coming over to have dinner with us. For each mood I want to play that particular playlist with lets say 500 songs. If I want to do the same things the very next days, my shuffle play won't remember which songs I played the day(s) before and I might hear the same songs over and over and over again...