[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.

[josiahmcmenamy]

Has there been an update to this post? The update on 2021-09-14 was promising, but to my knowledge there has been no change to the shuffle algorithm. There is now the smart shuffle that adds song recommendations in, but given the number of people that want just a simple truly random shuffle, it should have been added by now. If this change was made and the shuffle is now truly random, I'll feel really silly. But I'm confident it still isn't truly random. As the original post mentions, I don't care if the option is buried in settings or made a premium feature, but there should absolutely be a way to make the shuffle truly random. I found this article from 2014 (likely dated now) explaining how the shuffle algorithm worked then, and the first sentence states "At Spotify we take user feedback seriously." Given how long this problem has been going on, this doesn't seem to be true. Please, I just want a truly random shuffle. It should take literally a day to implement.

[rozeboosje]

[teollo]

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this is very interesting, it is.
But I totally miss " some shell and php skills to set it up. "
Can you help me?
Can I direct message you?

[RedBowRiot]

So sick and tired of hearing the same eight songs when I turn on shuffle.

I have what I like to call "musical ADHD," when I turn on shuffle I don't want to be stuck in the same genre for an hour. I don't want to hear ten songs by the same arts back to back. I have 36 hours long playlists, I don't want to hear the same song again for 36 hours unless I actively add it to the queue. When I do my cross country drives, ai won't want to be messing around with my phone because I've heard the same song six times in as many hours.

My cache is cleared regularly (due to other Spotify failures), it's a fresh install of the app (since I was having video issues with my podcasts).

[WanTec]

Haha, without knowing the existence of this forum, I submitted this complaint to the helpdesk, which pointed me to this thread 🙂
Got a suggestion to click on different songs from the playlist and then change the 'algorithm'.
I have also once again indicated the need to prioritize and solve this mega frustrating issue..

[Darth_GTB]

Ok, now I understand why in a very homogeneous punk rock playlist, it would frequently play like 5 Ramones in a row. This is annoying. I was about to report this as a bug, but it seems to be on purpose... Shuffle should be at the very least random or if you want a nearly random algorithm, make it like it prevents from the same song to play twice in a 5 songs span sort or thing, but don't actively group songs.

[TurboDiverArt]

OK, turned off Automix in settings/playback and cleared the cache.  Gonna give that a go to see what happens.  I have a 6-hour trip and a playlist that's got 62 hours of music on it (1000+ songs).  Gonna try shuffle with "smart mix" off to see how it goes.  I've listened to the same group of songs from this play list so many times that it'll become pretty apparent to me if the same songs are still being played.  While a complete failure and still unacceptable, if doing the above things and clearing the cache from time to time at least picks a different 150 songs I won't want to pull my hair out.  Still need to do more research if Apple Music's shuffle is any better cause money wise it's cheaper to get the Apple family bundle with music and TV than it is to have just apple TV plus Spotify family.  I'd like to say that Spotify would actually take this thread seriously and fix shuffle or add a randomize if people start to leave the platform but it's very clear Spotify doesn't monitor its forums or customer complaints and really doesn't care.

[zx6dude]

Bye, bye Spotify. I wish I could say it has been a pleasure, but it really hasn't.

For a music streaming service, you end up repeating songs so much, that there artists that I used to like, but now I'm fed up with. 

Off to another provider,  hoping for a better experience. It would be difficult to be worse. 

[TurboDiverArt]

OK, I've been listening to the same playlist for the past 14 hours and I'm surprised to say I don't think I have heard a duplicate yet.  Additionally, I definitely heard songs from this list that I have not heard in a very long time.  I think the trick was turning off AutoMix and clearing the cache.  I think the issue is actually the cache.  I'm monitoring the cache, I currently have 650Mb in cache from the 14 hours of listening and have 200Mb "free", whatever that means.  My hypothesis is that once I fill my cache and have zero "free" that it will begin to repeat songs and not pull any new ones.  If this is the case I'll clear the cache again and see what it does.

[rednblu]

I find that Spotify shuffle works fine for me as long as I don't do anything that breaks the shuffle.  For example, a reboot of any shuffling device triggers a repeat of the last Shuffle on that device with every track repeated in the exact order of the last successful Shuffle.

Any Spotify engineer can repeat this severe design bug by 1) shuffling a five-track playlist-- for convenience in watching the design bug in totality, 2) then step through the resulting shuffled queue. As you can see, the tracks left in the queue reduce as expected.  And 3) there you have it-- This design bug causes the queue to refill with all the repeats in the same order as the last successful Spotify shuffle.

Consequently, the user has to do a manual "initialize" before each reShuffle.  As expected in Spotify, the users themselves have to figure it out and make it work correctly.