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!

[hans-jürgen]

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_daniel_ schrieb:

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.

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That is probably correct, as I have noticed that the last song played might be remembered when you simply have played Your Music -> Songs in shuffle mode before instead of a static playlist, but it will go on playing the whole album where that song came from and not the last generated play queue. Xbox Music will do that, as far as I remember, i.e. remember the last play queue where you left and start with the last song you heard, not from the beginning.

[_daniel_]

No answer, neither here nor to my private message.

I mean I'm not sure whether me and ALL the other users complaining about this bug made ourselves clear enough: the flawed shuffle mode makes Spotify basically unusable in the long term! At one point the only work-around is changing to another provider.

I get the feeling Spotify's support crew is a bit too small to adequately take care of all requests in an appropriate amount of time. Reflects the importance of customer satisfaction to Spotify... Not really 21st century

[craigm066]

Is there going to be ashuffle feature for the pc version please put it in it is quite ennyoing listening to the same artists over agian 

[SR_Penny]

This is still an issue (for me at least, as it's the one feature I use daily and still doesn't work at all), so today I have cancelled my Spotify subscription and have moved to Google Play Music All Access. Goodbye Spotify.

[SebastianSaint]

May I propose a solution?

Spotify Coders:
1) Create a data field for each song that stores the time I last played that song.
2) Whenever the player is on Shuffle, choose the next song from the current playlist only considering the 10% of songs on the playlist with the oldest LastPlayed value.

Here's my logic:
1) The current song will not be replayed until I have heard at least 90% of the other songs in the playlist.
2) It will work if I listen with or without interruption.
3) It will work if I switch between playlists containing some of the same songs.
4) The solution remains simple.