[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.

[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 

[Enced]

This is the one thing that makes me not want to pay a monthly subscription. I don't want to listen to the same songs over and over, that's why I want a shuffle mode. When I've talked to other people about this, they have suggested I should use apple music instead. As a work around, I've created a playlist called "Spotify-overplays-these" where I put the songs it keeps playing in preference to being random, that way I may actually eventually get to listen to all of my songs. [True shuffle is not difficult for a computer to do, it only needs the time stamp of when a playlist was last modified and the time stamp when the shuffle was started to seed the random number generator to permute the list (or choose a permutation).]

[Plazmex8]

If 5.5k votes aren't enough for Spotify to fix almost a decade long bug, then I don't what will.

[dank13]

Spotify has over 678 million users, including 268 million subscribers. 5.5K votes is 0.00081% of users....  I don't think that is going to make a dent on Spotify pockets even if we all leave tomorrow... Unfortunately that is the reality we are facing.... Spotify don't give a fk about us.

[oddindeed]

hey spotify, your shuffle sucks **bleep**