[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.

[JazzLusingando]

I would like to offer a few troubleshooting insights that have not yet been specifically identified by other posts.  I too am experiencing problems in the shuffle programming, surely surpassing the intended concepts of weighted Smart Shuffle. 

I have numerous playlists that aggregate into thousands of songs, and the playlists are nested within multiple folders.  The reason I'm identifying this as not likely an intended result of Smart Shuffle is that precisely the same sequencing of groups of songs—from within merely a small percentage of all songs from the selected playlists—repeat every time I restart a shuffled set of playlists, several times a day, every day, often for weeks.  The overall assortment of songs slightly changes with each restart (still only a small percentage of the full playlists), but within that assortment are multiple segments of ten, twenty, or more songs that play in precisely the same order as they did during the each of several previous plays of the same group of playlists.  The first song is usually different with each restart.

I have tried all of the proposed workarounds, such as clearing the cache, adding/deleting individual tracks, clearing the queue, app updates, toggling shuffle on/off, and toggling the Connections status.  These experiences are from the Windows app (version 1.2.12.902.g1924b088) , running on a PC with Win10.  I have tested multiple groups of multiple playlists, and the problems remain consistent.

The problems are painstakingly mitigated by manually going into the queue, deleting multiple series of queued songs, and leaving the few fresh tracks that were interspersed among the repetitive segments.  I also acknowledge benefit--but not a full recovery--from the efforts by Adam Davis for his amelioration efforts at randomness via his selfless work on add-ons via spotifytolz.com.  While Mr. Davis and others have developed randomizers with excellent interfaces, they inherently cannot be automated natively within Spotify, which therefore prevents such plays as nested playlists within variable folders.

I am happy to provide programmers with any other troubleshooting insights.

Thank you.

[Herleif]

Add a switch in settings that switch between normal and true shuffle.  please!

It's 2023 and shuffle still do not play all tracks in a playlist in random order. 

My theory why this is so:
Most of Spotifys millions of users do not play huge playlists, if they happen to put on all the old albums of Madonna they really actually just want a mix of the top tracks which is what the current shuffle seem to give, they never listen long enough to get to the lesser known tracks and they don't care. 

But for the love of god, for all the rest of us who have long lists and want to explore and be surprised by new and older tracks, maybe make a playlist of artists on a label we like and explore it with shuffle , just shuffle all tracks and play, ignore what is most played or when it was added.

[Herleif]

How I test if shuffle works in Spotify webplayer.

open a playlist with 150 songs or more
turn shuffle off
Press play
Enter queue list
it will have queued only about 80 of the tracks 

now press shuffle
Note that it has shuffled in tracks that were not among the 80 you just saw, so it does see the whole list.

Make note of a particular track

play or reload the list and turn shuffle off and on

you will see that from your long list of tracks your noted track will always be "picked" in the 80+ that it lines up.

That's not shuffling, if it was, new tracks from your list would have appeared as you activated shuffle.

[ReAkTrator]

creates a feature that allows you to randomize the order of the songs in a playlist.

[Ignacius_Reilly]

Hello,

In the best English I'm capable of, and in french just under ...

Same issue here. I disabled the "mix automatique" mode (in french) in the parameters, but it doesn't make any difference to me : the shuffle mode seems to select the same titles over and over again. I've done a playlist with something like 800 titles in it. Not impressive I guess, but still. When I listen to twenty titles one day, I expect to hear a mostly different selection the next, but instead a third to half of them are just the same.

I'm aware random can trick one's mind, but in this case it's way too frequent to leave me with any doubt. 

I hope there's no commercial agenda behind it, and that we'll get a real randomized shuffle mode some day.

I'd also like to add a thought about the "official language of the community" : quite condescending, if I may. I tend to think that the Spotify community is composed with its customers, all of them. Maybe I'm wrong. Anyway many of us aren't able to speak or write English, and a major company like Spotify should be able to hire at least one speaker of every country it has business in.

Have a good day.

Bonjour,

Et maintenant en bon Français.

Même problème en ce qui me concerne. J'ai désactivé le mix automatique dans les paramètres, mais ça ne change pas grand chose à mon sens. La lecture aléatoire tend à sélectionner encore et toujours les mêmes titres. J'ai une playlist de près de 800 titres. Pas très impressionnant j'imagine, mais tout de même. Quand j'écoute 20 titres un jour, je m'attends à ce que la plupart soient différents le lendemain. Or j'estime qu'entre un tiers et la moitié d'entre eux reviennent d'une lecture à l'autre.

Je suis bien conscient que l'esprit peut avoir du mal à appréhender le hasard et ses coïncidences, mais vérifier ce phénomène jour après jour ne laisse que peu de place au doute pour ma part.

J'espère qu'il n'y a pas là de volonté commerciale (honnêtement je n'ai pas l'impression), et que nous pourrons un jour bénéficier d'une véritable lecture aléatoire.

J'ajoute un mot à propos de l'Anglais comme "langue officielle de la communauté" : l'idée est assez condescendante, si je puis me permettre. Il me semblait que la communauté regroupait l'ensemble des clients de Spotify - mais je me trompe peut-être ? Or nous ne parlons pas tous Anglais (je suis par exemple loin d'y être à mon aise), et Spotify me semble être une compagnie assez florissante pour embaucher au moins un locuteur pour chaque pays dans lequel elle prétend offrir ses services et faire des bénéfices.

Bonne journée à tous.

[Patoupichou]

Bonjour à tous. Même souci. Çà me saoule d'écouter les mêmes morceaux, alors que j'utilise la fonction aléatoire. SPOTIFY ne semble pas réagir... Dommage je vais aller à la concurrence qui a une véritable fonction aléatoire.

[Patoupichou]

Hello everyone. Same concern. It makes me drunk to listen to the same songs, while I use the random function. SPOTIFY doesn't seem to react... Too bad I'm going to go with the competition which has a real random function.

[Absurd_Her0]

The fact that applications like https://shuffle.virock.org/how-virtual-shuffle-works exist is evidence that there is a demand for this feature.   I see some of the suggestions with many votes and yet a basic feature like this remains faulty.  Come on Spotify  - just because your awesome doesn't mean you can't be displaced if you ignore feedback about this kind of basic functionality.

[Mookpsu]

I just love reading all these posts while I'm enjoying my true shuffle w/
Amazon Music. Just finished up my Queen Favorites custom playlist, heard
every song in random order with no duplicates until the playlist was over.
Spotify will never fix this so if you want a true shuffle either use a 3rd
party program to randomly reorder your Spotify playlist and then listen to
it with shuffle mode turned off or give your hard earned money to another
company that actually cares about its customers! I chose the latter

[Moorehabs]

I work 8 hrs a day I can't be on my phone changing. I want to hear my full list. Why change???