[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.

[Herleif]

Clearly when Spotify fail to implement true shuffle it's because we who have huge playlists and want true shuffle are a minority, Spotify has millions of users and most are casual listeners,  meaning , IF they were to put all of madonnas old albums in a playlist they would actually prefer to hear the hits and wouldn't normally listen long enough to need a true shuffle or have any interest in the "b-sides"  -  What I suggest is an toggle in settings where you can turn smart shuffle on or off.   "Off"  being what we all want - it plays ALL the songs in the playlist in a random order!   

[rozeboosje]

"What I suggest is an toggle in settings where you can turn smart shuffle on or off"

Or simply implement something like Amazon Music's "Randomise Playlist". It basically just shuffles the entire play list as if it's a giant deck of cards and then persists this new order of songs. After that you're not even in a "shuffle" mode anymore; you just play the play list from start to finish. Once you reach the end you just hit "Randomise Playlist" again and it's all new and fresh for you for the next round.

I have a giant play list with almost 78 hours of music in it that I play during times when I'm in flow at work and I don't need to be interrupted by colleagues. I might be on song number 378, and I just start playing from there. By the end of that chunk of work I may be on song 402, and I take note of that number. The next time, I go back into the playlist and start playing it from song 402, and so on, and so forth. After a few weeks I reach the end. I usually let it play on for a while after that to discover new songs which I may then add to the play list, and eventually I randomise the playlist again and start at 1 the next time.

Works a treat.

[dstevens2-us]

Thank you for posting this. I, too, am using shuffle to be able to listen to a variety of music. To me, the way Spotify is doing the shuffle is the lazy man way. I would think that it would be obvious that we want to hear all the music in our playlist...or we would have made our own playlist of favorites. If this doesn't get fixed, I will try to find another music platform that can come up with the programming to do this the right way.

[decker12]

LOL, I posted my info and research literally years ago. Now this thread is 90 pages long and still nothing has been about it.

I came here to see how many other people were complaining about the god awful desktop UI redesign for Spotify and then decided, hey let's check in on that Shuffle thread from 4+ years ago. Still nothing from Spotify, still no change, still no nothing.

At this point I suggest everyone switch services. Just wait until you try out the "new" Desktop App experience. It's laughable how awful it is, and of course, no way to revert.

Apple Music is fine compared to this cluster that Spotify has been shoveling to us for years now. 

[Mesikammen]

It takes more work to make a smart shuffle then a true random shuffle.  The fact this thread is this big and been going on this long just shows Spotify dosen't actually care what the customers want.  This is a simple simple fix that older platforms had before and the fact they haven't made it an additional option is laziness or indifference at this point.  Its infuriating to have a playlist on shuffle not play all the songs.

[MojoTheJester27]

I play song direct from my liked songs list, over 10,000 songs in it. When I play songs on shuffle, I'll hear about 20 random songs, then they'll repeat the same songs in the same order. Why can't shuffle just mean random shuffle? Windows media player could do this well over 20 years ago when I used to do all my listening on the pc, seems odd that a music service in the 2020's can't do it

[jlesieur]

As mentioned before in this thread, I switched to Apple Music because of this issue. The random on that service has worked properly. Also, for what it's worth, I don't particularly like apple as a company and quit iPhones probably 8 years ago. I might explore Amazon Music as well. 

[rozeboosje]

I went with Amazon Music but they also aren't the most likeable company in the world. Whatchagonnado.... in the end these companies give their paying customers what their paying customers want. You can't argue with that.

[jlesieur]

@roze I agree. I'll stick with what gives me the normal, basic options I want. Like being able to actually shuffle my playlists. Spotify has proven it doesn't care about it's paying customers wishes, so I've moved on. 

[JazzLusingando]

I would like to offer a few troubleshooting insights that have not yet been specifically identified by other posts.  I too am experiencing problems in the shuffle programming, surely surpassing the intended concepts of weighted Smart Shuffle. 

I have numerous playlists that aggregate into thousands of songs, and the playlists are nested within multiple folders.  The reason I'm identifying this as not likely an intended result of Smart Shuffle is that precisely the same sequencing of groups of songs—from within merely a small percentage of all songs from the selected playlists—repeat every time I restart a shuffled set of playlists, several times a day, every day, often for weeks.  The overall assortment of songs slightly changes with each restart (still only a small percentage of the full playlists), but within that assortment are multiple segments of ten, twenty, or more songs that play in precisely the same order as they did during the each of several previous plays of the same group of playlists.  The first song is usually different with each restart.

I have tried all of the proposed workarounds, such as clearing the cache, adding/deleting individual tracks, clearing the queue, app updates, toggling shuffle on/off, and toggling the Connections status.  These experiences are from the Windows app (version 1.2.12.902.g1924b088) , running on a PC with Win10.  I have tested multiple groups of multiple playlists, and the problems remain consistent.

The problems are painstakingly mitigated by manually going into the queue, deleting multiple series of queued songs, and leaving the few fresh tracks that were interspersed among the repetitive segments.  I also acknowledge benefit--but not a full recovery--from the efforts by Adam Davis for his amelioration efforts at randomness via his selfless work on add-ons via spotifytolz.com.  While Mr. Davis and others have developed randomizers with excellent interfaces, they inherently cannot be automated natively within Spotify, which therefore prevents such plays as nested playlists within variable folders.

I am happy to provide programmers with any other troubleshooting insights.

Thank you.