[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.

[rozeboosje]

And when someone comes up with the next great idea, Spotify will be relegated to insignificance, listeners will be happy for a while, and then money starts talking.

Rinse

Repeat

[Mookpsu]

Rozeboosje it makes you wonder why we bailed on our MP3 players. I've been
with Amazon Music for many years and have no complaints with their shuffle.
As I type this I am listening to a 400 song custom playlist with shuffle
on. As it should it will play every song in random order with no repeats
until every song has been played once. I only switched to S**tify a few
years back because they seemed to integrate better with my Chromecast but
the lack of a true shuffle was enough to take me back to A.M. My biggest
complaint with A.M. (at least the Android app) is that when you close the
app it also closes out whatever playlist you were listening to. I currently
use version 17.16.3 which does not have this problem. I'm sure at some
point that version of the app will no longer work at which point I will be
searching high and low for an MP3 player so I can listen to what I want
when I want in whatever order I want

[mike369mike]

Please give us a true shuffle option — with no algorithm.

All we’re asking for is basic functionality:

• Randomly select a song from the playlist.

• Don’t repeat any song until all others have been played.

• This should remain true even if we pause, switch playlists, or close the app.

That’s it. Simple.

It’s frustrating that your current shuffle often repeats songs before others are played. It feels like Spotify thinks it knows better than the listener — but we just want to hear our music the way we choose. Please respect that and give your customers more control.

[rozeboosje]

A shuffle without an algorithm is impossible. Maybe when Spotify start using quantum computers 🤪

But it's possible to write algorithms that are so chaotic that to us, humans, they will feel like "random".

Having said that, what you're describing is not "shuffle", it's "randomise playlist".

Like what Amazon Music lets you do

[oddindeed]

**bleep** SPOTIFY

[Steve_W]

Been using Spotify for over a decade, it’s great at its core but it has really frustrating design choices.

For some reason they’ve taken away the player controls when viewing the queue. Whenever I play a playlist, I always have the queue open to see what songs are coming next so I can skip accordingly. Now, you have to close the queue every time you want to skip next or back, so you end up constantly having to switch into the different interfaces just to use basic functionality. Why would you remove the player controls from the queue? Makes no sense at all.

Shuffle is also a massive bug bear. Spotify does not have a true shuffle, it uses their own algorithm to play what songs it ‘thinks’ you want. This is infuriating because every time you start a playlist or reshuffle, you end up having the same songs repeated constantly, and the same artist playing back to back all the time. At which point you end up having to skip most of them, which as I said with the problem before means you can’t even stay on the queue interface to do it! The enhanced shuffle is also broken, and every time it changes to the next song just then reshuffles the playlist all over again.

Really strange design choices that really let it down.

[うっすー]

シャッフル再生とリピート再生再生のたびに外れてしまって使いにくい😡早急に改善してほしいです。

[rozeboosje]

もし私があなただったら期待はしないと思います。

[restaurant_boy]

Hey everyone, I just wanted to come here to say that I spent last weekend examining this issue further by using the Spotify developer api to try and rewrite a better shuffle and realized it's not as simple as we think! 

1. Brute randomizing is rough because there isn't an easy way to just randomize: track in library although it's fun to try and randomize other algorithms by filtering multiple years; genres; moods; etc.
2. "True Random" actually sucks and is what the current Spotify shuffle actually is, which only accounts for what you've told it 
3. The problem for most of us in this thread might just be lack of data. After examining multiple failed shuffle algorithms, and some interesting ones, I realized the real problem for me is lack of data. I'm not a new user to Spotify, but I've certainly been through phases of music adoption over the years, and the majority of my listening is pre-Spotify. Fortunately, I used last.fm to document my listening for many years. 
4. Once I realized I could access years of listening, I wrote a python script that could connect to the free last.fm api, import the 10,000 songs in a playlist of a user's entire listening library, and add it to my Spotify account using the web api that you can create for free using a development mode api for personal use
5. I have been listening to my 10,000 song playlist all day today and it's the best thing to rediscover songs I haven't heard in years. Spotify uses something like 50 songs in its current shuffle context window, which is so annoying and obvious to play the same artists over and over.
6. If you didn't use last.fm, you can create a lookalike profile by finding a user who listens to music that matches up with what you might have listened to and generate a 10,000 song playlist to add to your shuffle algorithm's context and improve results with the same last.fm api and Spotify api and python script

I wrote more about this whole exploration here: https://vibecodingcommunity.substack.com/p/the-time-i-vibe-coded-to-solve-musi

I can share this process, unfortunately with a very limited number of individuals due to Spotify's api limitations. If I could make a website for anyone to create a playlist based on a last.fm profile I would, but I need access to a non development mode api key. At the moment I can only add 25 users manually to "test" which is not realistic given that this thread alone has 5,000 likes. 

[oddindeed]

fock spotify