[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.

[luciano9429]

I've had automix deactivated for months and I've periodically cleared the cache and nothing has changed, I always hear the same songs. The situation has gotten worse now that they are Premium, it happens less in the free version

[TurboDiverArt]

You don't have "smart mix" on, do you?  This definitely does stupid stuff as well.  So far, at least 15 hours in and no dups.

[rednblu]

    >> I always hear the same songs.

On your desktop Spotify player, what happens if you watch your queue when you toggle Ctrl-S, Ctrl-S several times after you start the play on the third track of a five-track playlist?--- Do the last four tracks on your queue actually change position, or are the last four tracks permanently stuck in position?

It's not fair that the Spotify users have to do these repeated diagnostics, I know-- But I have to do several diagnostics and fixes about every ten days-- or the Shuffle gets frozen in frustrating repeat loops that make me really angry if I cannot outwit this buggy Spotify shuffle.  So far I have always finally won-- Kind of like a hypnotizing video game, for me-- sigh.

[Darth_GTB]

BTW, yesterday I started getting music that isn't in my playlist when playing in shuffle mode. It's not even from a genre I listen to. I hope this is just a bug and not an ad in disguise

[TurboDiverArt]

<<BTW, yesterday I started getting music that isn't in my playlist when playing in shuffle mode. It's not even from a genre I listen to. I hope this is just a bug and not an ad in disguise>>

You don't have SmartMix or AutoMix on, do you?  I think at least one of these adds suggested songs to your play list.

[luciano9429]

Now I'm trying, I kept the smartix activated because I also like to listen to recommended music but not always the same ones. If these functions, including automix, don't work, what's the point of keeping them active?

[TurboDiverArt]

Agree, that's why I turn them off.  If they had a true shuffle or randomize that worked I would leave them on but I suspect they compound the problem.

[luciano9429]

Sure, but we have to pay the premium to have these long-proven inefficiencies

[Darth_GTB]

> You don't have SmartMix or AutoMix on, do you? I think at least one of these adds suggested songs to your play list.

- Automix label says the following: _Allow seamless transitions between songs on selected playlists_. This doesn't imply it will insert suggested, completely unrelated songs to the playlist. But I will turn it off and check if it helps

- SmartMix doesn't show up in the Playback settings.

There is another one: Autoplay similar content. But if I understood well, this one would play same genre as playlist average. The songs I've been getting seem to be just popular songs in my country instead of songs that I would actually like, let alone similar to the playlist

[ThePodfather]

Updated on 2024-05-01

Hello everyone, 

Thank you for your continued engagement and valuable feedback on this idea. 

I'm afraid there hasn't been any change on the status of this idea since our last update. However, we've been reading all your comments and feedback which have been incredibly insightful. 

We’ll keep you folks posted as soon as we have any new info to share.