[All Platforms] Option to have a true shuffle

[jonathanleyerle]

So I’ve been noticing more and more recently that Spotify’s default shuffle feature doesn’t fully shuffle your songs. It does some sort of grouping to try to get similar songs together based off of what I’m sure is dozens of factors. Every time I shuffle a playlist (the one I noticed this with the most is ~100 songs and 6 hours of mostly full albums) it will group the songs mostly or completely together by album/artist, and given the number of times I’ve re-shuffled and checked the order there’s no way it’s just a coincidence. They also generally seem to be in the same order as well. If I hit shuffle play on a playlist it’ll generally put the same artists at the beginning every time.

With larger playlists of albums I am really not a fan of this shuffling method. If I have 6 hours of music on a playlist I will hardly ever have 6 hours to actually listen through the whole thing, but when I do listen to it I would like to hear all of the music on it equally, and not just the artist or two your algorithm likes to shuffle to first.

Anyways, I’m a reasonable man, all I’m asking for is an option to have a true shuffle (take all songs in the list, put them in a random order, and once they’re all played reshuffle them and play them again). Make it premium only if you want. I don’t think you should scrap the current shuffle algorithm because it sucks. Looking at some of the suggestions on here it seems like some people lobbied hard to have it that way. Just add an option for a true shuffle for those of us that don’t care about potentially getting the same song twice in a row.

[Mr_Glasses]

I want the true shuffle

[teollo]

dream on dreamer

[Fd11]

I want this as well. I don’t understand why this is difficult or even an issue to begin with.

[WalterHeape]

I have to speak up and vote for a true shuffle as well. Most of the playlists I have are between 100-200 songs. Every time I fire up one of my playlists, Spotify plays the same songs first. As a result, I've removed certain artists from my playlists. If I have a post-punk playlist that has 130 songs in it and I hear a Foals song within the first 10 minutes EVERY TIME I'm going to get sick of the song. Some artists in these playlists rarely play at all. I want to say it seems like the more popular artists play more frequently, and I want to hear all of the artists equally in my playlists.

[Mookpsu]

Add me to the list of frustrated users that want a true Shuffle mode. I remember back in the 90's when multi disc CD players came out they were programmed with smart random so I'm fairly certain this technology would not be hard for Spotify to implement. Amazon Music figured it out! Thanks to a Christmas present I'll be a Premium subscriber for the next year but there is no way I'm renewing if this issue has not been corrected. I have one custom playlist with over 800 songs and less than an hour into it I was hearing songs that had already been played. Makes it unlistenable and makes Spotify useless for me

[decker12]

For anyone keeping track, since Mihail and Spotify posted their comment and asked for "help" in diagnosing and fixing this problem, it's been:

• 11,491,200 seconds or
• 191,520 minutes or
• 3192 hours or
• 133 days or
• 19 weeks

Since I gave them all the information they asked for, and haven't received even a courtesy reply from anyone to acknowledge that I contacted them. No request for further information, no "hey here's a beta build try this", not even a "the developers would like to see your playlist so they can analyze what could be happening.". Just 100% radio silence.

This "live ideas" forum is a sham. Spotify doesn't care about what their users want, this is all smoke and mirrors, stringing us along while giving us the impression that our comments and concerns about the product are being listened to.

[Mookpsu]

Sounds like they care about their paying customers as much as Pandora. I
think I've been waiting over two years for Pandora to fix their inability
to connect to Chromecast like it used to.

[heraschanka]

Has anyone researched other platforms like Youtube Music or Apple Music? Do any of them have the better shuffle option?

[rozeboosje]

@heraschanka yes, I terminated my Premium membership with Spotify and I moved to Amazon Music

It, too, has its problems for sure. None of these platforms are perfect. But what Amazon Music DOES allow you to do that Spotify are stubbornly refusing to implement is to have a simple option to shuffle an entire play list and persist it in its shuffled state. After that you can play the entire list from top to bottom, thereby ensuring that you don't get repeats after only hearing a small percentage of the songs in your play list.

The one minor issue with this is that Amazon Music (and I'm talking about running the Desktop application in Windows) doesn't have the option to close the application and then open it and resume a play list from where you left off. That's a bit of a pain, but I've gotten into the habit of taking note what song I'm on when I close the app and then I just navigate back to that song the next day.

[Mookpsu]

Amazon Music does a true random shuffle but they've done some recent
changes to their app that has people fuming. No longer connects to
Chromecast and it doesn't save your playlist once you stop listening