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.

[Cactusdan]

Yeah, this is definitely not fixed...I should not hear the exact same song twice in a matter of 10 songs when I've got 1,200+ songs, half of from artists I never hear unless I seek them out.

Example: I have ~25/1,200 songs from The Shins, and yet I hear at least 2 of their songs every single dang time I shuffle through my songs. And yet bands like Yawn (~10/1,200), I rarely hear on shuffle.

If I've played the song in the last day or two on shuffle, mark it as played and don't play it again unless the app has played through everything else once. The logic should not be that difficult...

[kneipe2]

@jsomm2 I get what you're saying (though, the part about the code breaking down with a certain number of songs or more, if that were the case, you would get the program crashing if that were the case) but you remind me of some friends I have that are chrisitan and say "I wish the church would, you know, focus more on helping the poor and doing good and less about money, but I totally think the church is **bleep**ing awesome!" Spotify has the potential to be great and my guess as to why their shuffle sucks so much is that

1) they have really horrible programmers working on this portion of the code (cf., e.g., the Microsoft Dogs project), or

2) there are limitations put on the programmers by the overall mission of spotify to be able to smoothly run on various media.

I think it might be something of a combination of the two. Over the years I've seen complaints about and experienced an update from spotify where suddenly it is running very slow, takes forever to load a song, and the like. The problem is that this is all conjecture. The spotify team came out with **bleep**ing lazy stupid moronic blog post where they flatout lied about how their randomizer works in the hopes that they could bamboozle a crowd that mostly didn't know the finer details about what they were talking about (if the author of that blog would like to comment on and defend their position, I would welcome it).

What would be nice is if they would come out and say something like (assuming this is true): "We realize that most people want a good randomizer as well as a seamless experience when using spotify. In order to have both of these, though, due to current limitations in technology/coding/fapping/etc. our randomizer can only do such and such things with play lists of about so long, etc. etc. etc...."

Instead they run around like W. saying "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!" when it's anything but that, ignoring the problem, the users (their lifeblood), and saying "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain; everything is working great, just keep using our product..."

So to the spotify team, honesty about your shortcomings, whether they be bad programming or simply limitations in what you can do, would be a refreshing change to your bull**bleep** "IMPLEMENTED!!" label for this issue which is clearly still ongoing and anything but finished. Also, for **bleep**s sake, take that stupidass blog post down about the shuffle/random function. It's so wrong it makes my brain hurt just thinking about it. Or at least update it on the gambler's fallacy portion, which is fallacious (not fellatious) itself.

[kneipe2]

One other thing I was just thinking about, there is an open source version of spotify available at http://despotify.sourceforge.net/ which would allow users to modify the randomizer. That would be another option besides using something else like pandora (which is awesome, btw). If someone gets one that works well they could release their hack for everyone, though I'm not sure spotify would be able to use it, depending on the license the person puts on their hack. Just another thought.

[LordGolder]

I don't know when you made these changes, but I haven't noticed anything.

I always seem to have my music shuffled by when I put it in the playlist.  So I'll have music being shuffled from the last 3 months and ignoring all the other music I've put in it over the last 5 years. 

[preloquiem]

Hi everyone.

As far as I know, I am not the only person that noticed that shuffle button does not really shuffle the songs the way it is supposed to. It plays some of the songs - it even plays the same songs a couple of times, but it does not play others. I have no idea how it chooses the songs which it is going to play, but it is really frustrating because I do not add, let's say, 300 songs to the playlist only to hear 100 of them. For example, I recently created a playlist with 211 songs, some of the songs were just random songs that I liked, but I also added three of Rihanna's albums. I click "shuffle" and the only songs that played, literally all of them were Rihanna's songs. And she was not the only artist whose whole albums I added.

All I'm asking for is an option where the shuffle button, or any other button for that matter, plays all the songs from a playlist in a random order and does not repeat any songs until all of the songs from the playlist have been played.

Or am I the only one with that problem?

[msteelio91]

Adding to this since this is STILL not fixed and I'm on the edge of getting rid of my premium account as a result. 

I sincerely hope a dev or support rep will at least read the below since I think I have some new insight.

I have a playlist with over 1,600 songs, and every morning on my way to work I hear a selection of the same 40 or so of them. The key here is that it is also extremely common for the same SET of songs to be played. So if the algorithm has decided on day one that songs A, B, C, D and E should be played in that order - on the next day, or even a couple days in a row, I may once again here songs A-E in the exact same order.

This is not ok - because that means that even if your wonderful algorithm functions perfectly, it is not altering itself and instead using the same "starting point" throughout the playlist every time it runs.

Further evidence of this is that after skipping ahead over and over and over....and over, I might eventually see a song that I haven't in weeks. However if I do the usual; get in my car, pick my playlist, hit shuffle - I'll likely hear all the same things I heard yesterday. My commute is 20-30 minutes long, my playlist has over 115hrs of music to choose from, the chances of me hearing the same SETS of songs should be astoundingly low, instead of something I would bet money on being able to reproduce. 

In closing: Spotify, I love your service, and I've been a paying member since it was possible, but the fact that this issue has gone on since 2012 without any real fix is ridiculous. The only thing stopping me from moving on at this point is having to remake my playlists in a new system. Please don't make me do that.

[Sivee]

I've just tweeted Daniel Ek, to try and get some focus on this issue. Apple music is looking very tempting, as their shuffle function simply works as expected. If enough people contact the CEO, surely something has to be done to fix it??

https://twitter.com/Sivee111/status/770548835521290240

[3mon]

At this point im pretty sure there must be some sort of obscure royalty workaround to save some money, or similar conspiratory reasons for them to not only not fixing, but ignoring this issue for 4 years 😛

[LeoJLeBrut]

CONSPIRACY ALERT: I have also come to suspect that there is code in the shuffle which has a bias to play songs which produce a lower royalty expense (paid by Spotify). The reality: shuffle/randomization algorithms of a very good quality are well-understood and not particularly hard to implement (to be complete: it is easy to write a bad one and extremely challenging to write a perfect one). Assuming that Spotify has an intern that could do this well and quickly I begin to wonder "why" and as we know the answer to most "why" questions involves money...and this royalty conspiricy thing is the only explanation I could come up with. If it is the case this is the type of thing that class action lawyers love to sink their teeth into. If it isn't the case (say: all artists are paid the same royalty) then the only thing I can come up with is that a Spotify executive needs to meet with someone in engineering. I use an Androif phone, have 2000+  songs in my playlist and a) disappointed that I don't get to hear more variety and b) sick of some of the songs I put on the playlist (keep hearing them too often).

[Sivee]

One of Spotify's programmers, Oskar Grenholm (@bobcat_zed on Twitter) is looking into my specific issue. He's going to look at my listening logs to see what the issue is. Funny, I'm actually listening to one of my playlists and the same bunch of songs are coming up! 

Let's see how we get on...