Implement an actual shuffle function

[RoninTheOrigina]

Yes, you read that right.  The "shuffle" function in Spotify is nothing more than a randomizer.  There's a difference?  YES.

RANDOM - Play one song.  The next song can be ANY song in your playlist.  Including the one you just listened to.  Though I've never had this specifically happen, I literally just heard the same song that I heard 2 songs ago.  This is how Spotify's "shuffle" currently functions.

SHUFFLE - Take your entire list, shuffle them (like cards), and play the first song in the shuffle.  Once finished, move that song off the pile.  Once the pile is depleted, shuffle the deck again and start over (maybe pop a message up).

I know enough about programming (not much) to know that shuffling is probably a bit harder than random, but come on.  I may be in the minority, but I don't have a lot of little playlists.  I have one list with nearly a thousand songs in it, because I like all the music, and am rarely not in the mood for one of those songs.  But what I can't stand is hearing the same song over and over again.  I think there may even be songs in my list I haven't heard yet, while I've heard others 4-5 times.

I know it may not matter much, but I would probably lay down the money for at least a year subscription if this feature was implemented.

EDIT: Another user pointed out that I can see what all is queued up in my shuffle by clicking the Play Queue link, and that Spotify supposedly sets up a rolling shuffle of 50 songs.  It would be nice if this range could be expanded to say 50-100% of your playlist.

EDIT 4/6/12: I just dealt with the same song 16 tracks later.  The song played the first time yesterday afternoon.  I went home, listened for a bit on my home PC (just a few songs), then started listening again this morning.  If the list recycles itself after a day, or if you log in from another computer, I see that as an area for improvement.

[pbrownpb18]

I've just cancelled my Premium subscription, primarily due to this issue.

[devjj79]

A few days ago shuffle was horrible - stuck at songs starting with the letter A and what not - but for some reason shuffle works fine now with me. Must have been an update.

[rednblu]

                 Never an unrequested repeat!

Thank you everyone, for giving me ideas and tools for getting Spotify to play everything without repeats!

One set of friends like wild classical music too much-- but they did produce a very random feed of all the tracks of music on Spotify-- I have an automatic process that removes some of the artists and talking tracks that I don't want to hear, and I end up with the first two automatically updating Public playlists at >> https://open.spotify.com/user/rednblu << --




>> AllOfSpotify_Radio   https://open.spotify.com/user/rednblu/playlist/4BIEfdQC3CXOa1N0mTFAEy << AllOfSpotify_Radio -- contains too much classical music, but it is very random and seems to hold normally a whole month's worth of  24X7  tracks-- Normally over 6000 unique tracks, 4000 unique albums, and 1500 unique artists-- no repeats, other than deliberately inserted repeats.

                         >> Songs_Radio  https://open.spotify.com/user/rednblu/playlist/0td5oLjwJt59zm1sVHbAHP << is my automatic daily and sometimes hourly updated snapshot of a feed from a group of friends that really like Van Morrison-- so they produce a feed that plays every Van Morrison track on Spotify once a month-- mixed randomly with all the other tracks-- and they always break this feed into a 3000 track updating snapshot-- 3000 tracks at a time so that they can just set this feed to "Available offline" and they can play this on their mobile devices even when they have no WiFi-- and then the snapshot will update automatically whenever they are connected to free WiFi.

Several of my friends worked up a means of loading either of these two automatically updating feeds into the "Your Music" function on a Free subsidiary account with Great Spotify advertising!-- (Oh, yes, I laugh.)

Loading 4000 albums into "Your Music" makes the Spotify player really sluggish-- and I am coming to the opinion that several of you have suggested-- That Spotify needs to give us a truly random feed of AllOfSpotify where no transmitted track appears in that feed again-- until each and every Spotify track has been transmitted through that feed.

The users then would have a Filter control panel with buttons to ThumbsDown any track, album, or artist-- and then any ThumbsDowned track, album, or artist would be skipped for my personal feed-- just like my Spotify player-- thank you, Spotify-- skips any "grayed out" track that won't play anyway.

Here's to great listening-- and I appreciate everybody reporting what the competitor services provide that Spotify does not yet.  I keep all of your recommendations and suggestions in the back of my mind as I sometimes wrestle with available feeds to get the mix of music that I like to hear!  

(I laugh.)

It all works perfectly in this perfect of all perfect worlds!-- does it not?

[Grayw8080]

I have a playlist of 2000 songs. If I hit shuffle and just leave it playing will it:

a - eventually play all 2000 songs, with each song being played once and then stop (or start again)?

b - continuously play songs with the likely probability for each song being played next be 1/2000?

c - only play a few hundred of those songs at 'random' and never play all 2000 regardless of how long you leave the playlist playing?

it seems to me to be option c.

I am running Spotify on iPhone or iPad either direct in the app or via Sonos app.

Thanks

[brandynhazelton]

Yes, currently option C would be the outcome, it pulls 80 songs from your 2000 and shuffles them and there is no chance of playing the other 1920 songs.

Hoping they change this...

[thatsnotfab]

horrible, horrible suffle, still. in 2017. everyone I know who uses Spotify, Premium or not, has the same complaint. Same 30-ish songs over and over on a playlist of almost 500? Dude.

Cut your users some slack. The world is a crazy place and we just wanna hear the stuff that helps us cope.

[Tinkers84]

As of today it is still random and not a true shuffle function. It's super annoying. I don't have any duplicates so it's not a user error. 

[drdalton]

My shuffle still repeats way too frequently. It's like it gets stuck in a loop of about 15 songs. Really annoying.

Also, when I click shuffle on an artist it only seems to shuffle through their latest few albums. Can you please do better?

[Smellylegs]

I'm probably pretty late to this discussion and there's so many posts it's probably been touched already, but the shuffle play feature on Artists' pages is completely broken.    

When I press shuffle play on an artist, Spotify seems to favor only that artists' most recent material, which is extremely annoying.  I press shuffle when I want to hear a wide variety of an artist's work.  When an artist has 5+ albums and shuffle play plays 9/10 songs from their latest two, that kind of defeats the purpose of shuffle, no?  If I just wanted to hear that artist's new stuff, I would have played it myself!

[Guitarwizard94]

I find this is still an issue. I have close to 1000 songs on my main playlist and it seems to double up and repeat the same songs all the time. But seems to have a range. If I scroll somewhere close to the middle of the list, now I find I get more songs from the middle of the list and less from the top, but never anything from the bottom. I don't have this issue on the desktop app or the mobile app. However, at work, I don't have accesssto my phone or permission to dowload the desktop app. The shuffle in the web player is awful. Straight up.