[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.

[In2racn]

Well Spotify, I know it is only $12.99 a month, but you are done getting
money from me. Wake up and fix this, there are so many better options.
Over and out.

[rozeboosje]

I wouldn't continue to post here if I didn't feel Spotify was worthy of being given a second chance. But I cancelled my paid subscription several months ago now, and I won't even consider coming back unless this is comprehensively addressed. In the meantime I'm getting more and more comfortable with my new, paid for, Amazon Music subscription so I guess a day might come where even if Spotify genuinely fix this it will not be worth my bother to come back to a paid for Spotify subscription. We'll see.

[PaulSebby]

i would really like this to be a thing :)!

[Muzzy75]

Cancelled my premium subscription & have moved all my playlists over to Tidal, I'll give their 1 month free trial a go & see how the shuffle runs ........ if its a true shuffle great, if not then I'll move on to the next provider. 

I'd have preferred not to go but if Spotify can't listen to its paying customers then they deserve all the cancellations that they get.

[decker12]

Downsides to Tidal is that they don't have an Echo interface or an Echo app. All you can do is connect to an Echo using Bluetooth, just like it was a typical dumb BT speaker. That means every other sound effect that comes from your phone also transmits to the Echo.

You also can't tell an Echo to play a playlist - all you can do is ask it to play a song. It basically does not interface in any way with your Tidal account or your Tidal app. Ditto with Google Home. Tidal is seriously stupid when it comes to smart home devices. It's also been a problem for years so I doubt they'll ever fix it.

Also the Tidal desktop and app interface is pretty bad. You can't rearrange playlists, only sort by alphabetical so unless you rename your favorite playlists they'll never be at the top. Tons of other little things about it too that just seems poorly thought out. Shuffle play never defaults, you always have to turn it on for every time you want to play a playlist. The search bar always blanks out whatever you're searching for and the search itself is kind of dumb. Again all these problems have been reported for years so I doubt they're going to fix it.

Anyway while I hate Spotify for what it didn't do to the shuffle, so far Tidal is kind of meh from an operability standpoint. The sound quality is fantastic tho and the shuffle play works great.

[defr]

As there is a huge amount of comments (all blaming Spotify by the way but who cares about thousands of unhappy paying customers?), I put again this one from @bytebodger  posted in September 2020. 

Bytebodger, your tool is amazing and I officially love you!!!!

"They're not going to do anything about it.  They've been stubbornly denying the issue - and refusing to implement anything with true randomness - for YEARS.  That's why I created my own tool for doing true, random shuffles of my playlists:

https://www.spotifytoolz.com" 

[go_mizzou99]

Shuffle should me shuffle.   

Algorithms are ruining many platforms IMHO.

[raidu1]

This "smart" shuffle is getting on my nerves. This post is from 2020 and still nothing.

How long do we have to wait for it? 

If you like, i can go to some other music streaming service provider.

[Marshall3911]

Unfortunately other services (Apple Music for exemple) don’t do really better…..

[rozeboosje]

"Unfortunately other services (Apple Music for exemple) don’t do really better….."

I don't think that's true, but people do need to understand how randomness works. For example, say you have a play list with 1000 songs in it, 10 of those are by the same artist. People think that "randomness" would cause those 10 songs to appear with huge intervals between them. In reality you shouldn't be surprised if somewhere in that shuffled playlist there were 2 of those songs right next to each other.

Another problem with Spotify's shuffle is their concept of a play queue. As I discovered, if your Playlist contains more than 80 entries, Spotify creates a "play queue" of 80 songs from your playlist. It plays song number 1, and once it has played it, that song disappears off the queue, song number 2 goes to the top and becomes song number one, all songs are moved up like that, and Spotify picks another song from your playlist and puts it into the freed up 80th position in your play queue. Even if Spotify does NOT give different probability weightings to different artists and songs, even if their method of picking that song to go into the 80th spot were as honestly "random" as it's possible to be in software, I illustrated with code samples earlier in this discussion that you would expect on average to start hearing songs you had already heard earlier after 100 or so songs from a playlist with 1000 songs.

In that sense other services are undeniably "better". For example I have now moved to a paid subscription to Amazon Music, and it has an option to "randomise playlist". The result is like shuffling a deck of cards and then taking one off the top, one at a time, until you've gone through the entire deck, thereby ensuring that you will never see the same card twice until you have gone through the entire deck and shuffle again.

Is Amazon Music's "randomise playlist" perfect? **bleep** no. Pros: it shuffles the entire list and saves it so the list remains in this new, shuffled order as long as you want. Cons: it doesn't keep track of where you are so every time you open the play list it wants to start playing song number 1.

For me, personally, Amazon Music's pros outweigh the cons. When I stop listening to my randomised play list I take note of which song I was on at the time. The next day I open the randomised playlist I scroll down to that position and start play from there. For me that's a minor nuisance but I can see how that might be a deal breaker for others. Amazon appear to be as reluctant to change that behaviour as much as Spotify are to change their shuffle. For me, Amazon's flaws are less serious than Spotify, but were Spotify to implement their own version of "randomise playlist" AND implement the option to pick up where you left off, I'd return as a Spotify Premium subscriber in the blink of an eye.