[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.

[rednblu]

    >>  ...anything that makes every song on the playlist have the same chance of playing.

Currently, does the Spotify shuffle play all of your playlist of 90 tracks without a repeat?-- That's about 6 hours of music time, right?  What does your installation of Spotify do when your shuffle plays every track of a 90 track playlist?  Does it keep on playing?  Or does it stop?

[stevemcgowan1954]

Repeats the tracks…

[rozeboosje]

If you have a play list with 90 songs in it it should behave better if the algorithm is unbiased.

Back a couple of years ago before I stopped wasting my money on Spotify Premium I investigated their shuffle, so it's possible that things have changed now. Back then, it would start a "shuffle" by creating a queue of 80 "randomly" selected songs out of the playlist and play the top song from the queue, remove it and add a new selection to the bottom. If this was done in a "smart" way I would expect you to not hear any repeats until the 81st song during shuffle mode. If it repeats sooner than that and the algorithm is unbiased, it would indicate that it is even worse than I thought. That would hint to me that even the creation of the 80 song queue consists of repeating the instruction "pick a random song out of the playlist" 80 times, instead of "pick a random selection of 80 different songs" once.

Nothing would surprise me with Spotify's "top developers".

[Ivr]

Can confirm that the player glitches when you skip 90 songs. That's when it starts displaying one song while playing the music  of another, skip buttons cease working etc etc.  

I suppose that's Spotify thinking that people never listen more than 90 songs so they can put restraints on it for better performance.  

And if these 90 songs were a different set each day, people would indeed never notice that the shuffle is fake. But they do. It's the same 90 songs until you reset everything.

[rozeboosje]

As a programmer I fail to see how implementing a proper shuffle should impact "performance". Even implementing something like Amazon Music's "randomise playlist" should only take a fraction of a second and it could be done client side. Pull the IDs of all the songs in the playlist, shuffle them like you'd shuffle a giant deck of cards and save the newly ordered list of IDs back to the playlist. Simples.

[rednblu]

   >>  It's the same 90 songs until you reset everything.

What a curse!  How pray then?-- How can I "reset everything" to force the Spotify shuffle to work perfect again?

[metabaron]

Switched to YouTube music last week, my 1500 song Liked Songs playlist now plays songs I haven't heard in years and shows no bias at all to any particular songs. Considering that Spotify continues to ignore this issue and that YouTube music also gives you YouTube premium (no ads) I consider this to be a substantially better deal than sticking with Spotify. If you have this issue, switch platforms or continue to suffer - Spotify will not fix this issue.

[Slip269]

Well I've had 2 of my posts deleted without explanation, I'm guessing the mods don't like people hearing the truth 🙂

I'll be definitely cancelling my premium subscription now!

[Alburr]

Spotify this needs to be changed! It is ruining my experience. I listen to huge playlists with thousands of songs but have to listen to the same 50 songs over and over. It’s making me look for alternative options after paying for premium for years. 

Such a huge flaw! It’s not smart like you think it is… it’s just annoying!!!! 

[rednblu]

Huge flaw!  Yes!

But as in any successful video game, there are wonderful Easter Eggs hidden in the Spotify players that come and go-- that sometimes work for a while and make my Spotify shuffle work perfectly without that same 50 songs that repeat over and over-- 

Right now I am listening to track 959 from a continuous and perfect shuffle that I have run since Monday at 9 am-- after running that two-step, 10-second force initialization-- take a jackhammer to the Spotify code-- that we all worked up on this and associated forums-- with only Sleep on my desktop Win_11 and handoffs to my mobile without stopping and without rebooting and without networking glitches-- so I am lucky as measured by last.fm continuous scrobbling and monitoring . . . .

We could give Spotify intimate details of how to make this shuffle work-- all under one button-- if they would listen . . . .