Shuffle only working on part of Playlist

[1116074400]

I am playing a 434 song playlist on a Windows Vista desktop, but operating from a Win10 Laptop.

I have long felt that shuffle is not very random, but in the last few days I have noticed something specific and cannot find reference to it on the community.

Basically shuffle seems to limit itself to the top portion of the playlist depending on how it is sorted. Whether it is limited to 50, or more I have not and don't have the time to determine.

So if sorted by song title, the shuffled playlist only contain songs beginning A-D. Same if sorted by Artist - A to D again (ignoring "The"). If by time added to playlist then only the most recent etc.

That is not shuffle, and also means that there must be a collection of tracks that would never be played in shuffle!

It sort of overwrites everybody's previous concerns about the less than random nature of shuffle, something that as far as I can tell has never been addressed.

Spotify would be better if it worked properly and stayed working.

(Paid member for many years!)

[rednblu]

Have you ever tried one of the >> Shuffle Webpages << outside of Spotify?

[dubbs442]

Shuffle isn't working for me either.  I only have 88 songs in my playlist and only about 1/3 of my songs get played and several of the songs get repeated about every 10 songs in the play que.

[csabri10]

I've had a similar problem but instead it's by genre. I have a 320 song playlist of rap and classic rock, but when I hit shuffle it only plays the classic rock songs for some reason. I scrolled through the queue and found the first rap song more than 30 songs down. It's the weirdest thing because the division between both genres is almost 50/50, so there should be a 50% chance of each genre playing. Mathematically there's a .0000001% chance of not hearing a single rap song in 30 songs, so there must be something rigged and it bothers me. Is there a fix for this?

[rednblu]

There are several "user programming fixes" for the Spotify Shuffle bug that ignores and never plays major portions of a playlist.

I suggest you try first a >> Web page << that looks at each and every track of the InputBox and gives that track a random position in the output list-- Then you copy that OutputList into a Spotify playlist with the name of "Shuffled".  Seems rather simple, doesn't it!  (I laugh.)

Does that solution work for you?

[fyorasilverwolf]

Since I would already have to make a new playlist in order to use outside shuffling web pages, I just made alphabetical (by song name) playlists of <50 songs each. It will appropriately shuffle about 50 songs, I think, so this is an appropriate workaround that doesn't require anything outside of Spotify.

[rednblu]

Also, I just tested the >> replacement shuffle << that works on big playlists over 7000 tracks by either

* Shuffling the playlist inPlace or by

* Making a new shuffled playlist named automatically OriginalName with " - shuffled" appended to the OriginalName.

Has everyone found an acceptable "user programming fix" for the bugs in the Spotify shuffle by now?

[okkefaber]

I have the same issue but only noticed it today, I was getting the same artists over and over while I was shuffling all my songs. Spotify should change this. Perhaps it is capacity issue that loading and shuffling too many songs is not possible. Still, the list is there, so shuffling should not be too hard one would say.

[minklet]

On OSX and Android I have the same problem

After years of championing Spotify and even writing programs to tie it into a number of office jobs I've had, I'm giving up on them now. Why do so many tech companies go down this route of breaking their own product because they think they know better? If I have a 500 song playlist that I've curated over years, I don't want to listen to the same 30 tracks every **bleep**ing time I play it. It defeats the whole purpose. Why even have playlists that go over this arbitrary number?

Cancelling my premium subscription. 

[Tonks]

Yeah, this is freaking ridiculous. I spend at least 7 hours a day listening to music and I keep getting the same 50 songs over and over when my library has a couple thousand of them to choose from. It’s driving me insane. This needs to get fixed ASAP. 

[ql]

Hello! ql checking back in, I last commented on this topic in February, 2016. I'm still having this issue and still extremely annoyed by it. I notice it slightly less now that I use radio a lot more than my playlists, but the main reason for that is because of how horrible shuffling is on playlists.

Hopefully with enough comments and annoyance about this topic, Spotify developers will do something. Back in early 2016 I tried to contact Spotify developers, customer support, etc, and was unable to get through to anyone. Maybe its time to start going through LinkedIn and contacting devs that way? Their customer support is zero out of ten.

[Mangez]

I'm experiencing the same issues when trying to shuffle my 8000+ saved songs. It seems to only shuffle the first 100~ songs. This is extremely annoying. Spotify has been working great and had everything I needed up until a year ago or so. Been a loyal premium subscriber since 8+ years now, but these recent upgrades are really starting to annoy me.

[firmlygentle]

I found a fix. Reinstall spotify; It worked for me

[DJShoq]

I found a workaround fix. It seems to happen when you add new songs to a playlist. If you keep hitting shuffle you will notice that every time you hit it, the first song selected are very near to each other in the actual order of the playlist.

keep hitting shuffle and this eventually seems to clear itself. Then, until you add new tracks to the playlist, the shuffle appears to work fine every time you press shuffle. When you do add new tracks you will need to go through the process again.

Give that a try.

[dabalciunas]

Today I experienced that Spotify only remembers a maximum of 100 songs during a playback.

Suppose you have a playlist with 120 songs.

You have two devices (e.g. desktop computers), one playing and the other just controlling whats going on.

When you start playing the last song in your playlist with the controller computer, and then press the "next song" button (with shuffle disabled) it continues playing from the song exactly 100 positions ahead from the last song in your list (i.e. song number 20 in this example).

I've noticed a similar effect with shuffle enabled: Spotify initially buidls a temporary 100-song random playlist from your original playlist, and keeps playing only these songs. It does not considers your whole playlist at all. In this example, 20 out of your 100 songs will not be played at all, after this temporary playlist is constructed.

I would consider this fact as a bug OR a strong limitation in the player, rather than any sort of 'performance optimization' or 'feature'.

[ema1596]

I posted a workaround two years ago that work perfectly.  I haven't had any issues with it.  With the old version of desktop Spotify, you shuffle a playlist and it generates 100 songs in your queue.  Once you reach the last song, it adds another 100 *different* songs.  Like I said, I haven't had any issues in two years.  Just roll back, disable updates, and be done.  Frankly, I'm sick of the notifications for this post when many workarounds have already been posted two years ago.....

[Sylence]

This is a real problem.  Tech support told me to fix this I would have to start a brand new account, and lose all my "liked" music.  I have literally thousands of songs in that list, and I have probably 50 hours of work there.  It would literally be impossible to reproduce.  Spotify needs to fix this in some other way.

[ema1596]

Roll back your desktop version...  Or follow one of the many other workarounds that have been posted over the past two years.  If spotify hasn't fixed it yet, they probably never will. So either do what they say and lose your music, follow a workaround, or go to a different music service.

[Sylence]

The community should flood tech support with complaints.  I was able to get an escalated case started on this issue today.  I will report back about what happens, but I dont give up easily.

[ema1596]

I suggest you read back through the comments...  People have been there, done that.  Anything Spotify tells you is lip service.  Stop flooding everyone with notifications for a two year-old post.

[rednblu]

           >> ... flooding everyone with notifications . . . .

Anyone who does not find the new "user programming fixes" to the shuffle useful can "Unsubscribe" from this very useful thread by scrolling up this page to the top, just to the right of the green "Reply" button and find under "Topic options" the "Unsubscribe" option which will cut off for you any new notifications of the very useful findings in this thread.

Thanks for everyone's assistance.

And just as an aside, @ema1596 above gives the perfect beginning to get the Spotify shuffle to work perfectly on music libraries of 250K tracks-- Roll back your desktop version to the last working Spotify player and disable updates.  I also have all the latest versions of Spotify players on other devices-- but the last working Spotify player is best in debugging all of the recent players that have various critical functionalities missing or severely limited.