Why is the toggle shuffle on/off button disabled?

[#1]

For some reason the toggle shuffle button in both the spotify web player and app on my computer is disabled. When I click on it, it doesn't turn on. I dont' understand what happened.

[Kiril]

Hi there,

Thanks for posting and welcome to the Community!

We get that your Shuffle button is not functioning as expected on your desktop app and the web player. This is odd and we weren't able to replicate it on our end.

First off, it's worthwhile restarting the app twice in a row.  This means to log out and then log back in two times 🙂 It may sound odd but it's how the app does a refresh between the servers and your account. See if this will make things work as expected. 

If the above doesn't help for your desktop app, then it's well worth running a clean reinstall to get rid of any cached files that might be causing trouble. This reinstall is more thorough than the usual one, and has few extra steps taht we've linked for you to follow. 

As for the web player - is this still happening for you? You might want to try using a different browser or an incognito window of your browser, as this also removes possible cache-related issues.

If nothing of the above helps, please return with a short screen recording of your experience, so we can take a closer look and advise you better. Share with us also the exact details of your OS and the Spotify version you're running on your PC.
 

Hope you find this useful. Keep us posted if you have any questions.

[kaco_kew]

The shuffle button was missing for me too. According to SpotifyCares on Twitter, this is part of an A/B test. 🤬 It makes absolutely no sense to include hiding the shuffle button as part of any test since it pretty much makes playlists a useless feature.

So now the question is how do folks get out of 'hide shuffle button' experience and back into an experience variant that shows the shuffle button?

So frustrating!

[Kiril]

Hey there @kaco_kew,

Thanks for posting here as well.

I'm not sure if your case was similar to the one of the original poster here, but it's true that Spotify is always testing new features and is on the look out to make the music listening experience better for everyone! This is why it's possible sometimes to obtain a slightly different experience from your friends around. The best practice here is to always keep your apps and firmware updated to the latest available versions, so you don't miss the latest feature changes and fixes. 

Hope this helps clarify things. Don't hesitate to give us a shout if there's anything else we can help with.

[kaco_kew]

@Kiril,

These A/B tests are the precise reason I don't want to update the app anymore. My shuffle button was removed when I updated and now my playlists are pointless since I can't disable the shuffle feature.

I wish users had the option to opt out of AB tests. This is a ridiculous experiment! I'm paying for premium but am not allowed to decide on the order in which I want to listen to music. How did that ever strike Spotify as a smart thing to do? What am I paying for if I can't order tracks the ways I want to hear them?