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.

[InArt]

🙂 i just had the same idea and sent the idea on the feedback form. I hope this feature will soon be implemented

[Brols]

...AND a random option?

[user-removed]

I have huge playlists - designed to not repeat for days - designed to play like my own personal radio station. In a sense, I just want to create playlists that exclude songs I don't like rather than include songs I do. But, I keep hearing the same songs over and over. And when I check my play counts, I rarely ever see the "rare tracks" listed as having been played. That has led me to beleive that Spotify is not actually using a true randomizer. It seems I am getting a "Top 40" station - only they are my top 40. I want to hear the other 2000 songs too.

If your shuffle idea can get this problem fixed for me then I agree with and support it.

[Nitrolee]

PLEASE move this request up the list of priorities. 

I have a playlist of 700+ songs and with the Shuffle on yesteday (and other days) it repeated the same song(s) within a 3-4 hour span.  There are no duplicates of songs in the list, I like to edit carefully.

Suffle/Random, whatever you want to call it, should allow the playlist to play without repeating the same song within the list until it has gone through the whole list. 

[flagstudio]

Has anyone from Spotify responded to any of these "real shuffle request" threads? I've read through a few of them in the hope it will be implemented. I was looking for an existing solution to such a frustrating issue, and it seems there isn't one. 

We use Spotify at work to play music all day from a playlist of hundreds of songs that everyone contributes to. We set the playlist to shuffle, but we only hear a few dozen of those songs. Ever. Most of the playlist has never played. Ever. Why not? Shuffle doesn't infact work in the same way as iTunes which, unfortunately for Spotify, has set a precedent for what it means to shuffle a playlist. We have an expectation that it will choose a random order for all the songs and then play them one by one until all of them have played once. Instead, it selects a few, randomises them, and plays those over and over, in any order, and will play the same one twice, because probability says if you pick a random song, it could easily be the same one twice.

[mrfishlung]

Please implement this idea! Of course, the other option is to buy all this music outright, and use iTunes instead. 😛

I sure would love to be able to randomize my playlist without having to do it manually. Currently, it defaults to "date added" sorting. I'd love the ability to mix up my playlist, with the option to not have the same band played within 2-5 tracks, for example. Doing it manually is the pits!

Having it shuffle while playing is not good enough. Tracks repeat constantly, especially when the app on my phone turns off, or I shut my desktop computer down for the evening. The order is not set in the actual playlist, which seems kind of odd to not have as a feature.

Quite tired of being frustrated by this, because making large genre playlists (say 300 tracks) is pointless if it's going to reset the queue every time, and end up repeating songs.

[wolfgrrl]

I, too, am frustrated by the same "shuffle" order. My playlist is over 8 hours long, for work, and it shuffles in the SAME EXACT ORDER. I've listened to my playlist enought to know what song is coming next because it never changes.

Spotify, we need RANDOM. PLEASE.

[alorty]

I don't think this would be hard to implement. Put songs from a playlist in an array list, then randomly choose songs from it, removing the entry every time it is done and push it onto a stack (or queue) until the list is empty, and then just pop the songs from there. Once the secondary structure is emptied, just rinse and repeat.

I feel as though this should take less than an hour to implement and with as many people having expressed their desire for it that hour would be worth it.

[RoninTheOrigina]

So I haven't been back here monitoring this thread all that much, much to my surprise I find that this has generated over 400 kudos, which seems to me to be enough to warrant attention from Spotify, but unless I'm missing something...I just don't see it.

timberford, you said this is working the way I expect it to.  You explained the Play Queue, which if I understand you correctly, means this:

I double click my playlist to start playing my playlist of over 1,000 songs.  If I do ANYTHING to disturb the order of the songs as they exist in my shuffle (including but not limited to: playing something from another playlist and coming back, playing a single song I just searched for and coming back, searching out a specific song IN THE PLAYLIST and playing it, etc.), then the play queue will reset.  If that's the case, well I can understand the first two, but come on, why can't it pick back up where I left off after picking another song in the list?

Well I now have another problem, which I will be posting in a separate thread.  There is no prompt when deleting a playlist.  SERIOUSLY?!

[anthonator]

Is it possible an app could be built to implement this?