[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.

[dumbifyactuallysobad]

Literally the dumbest shuffle of any streaming service, it does not randomize anything, it plays the same **bleep** every time, no matter what you do, how do you screw up that badly.

Fix your joke of an app

[wdh010]

This seems like a no brainer. This has been the biggest problem I have with Spotify. Based the description of the current random it seems that it only makes it less random. Since the same songs play over-and-over again it sounds like it reinforces the priority of repetition. But maybe not. 

I also think the community votes to prioritize this may not make sense. How many users realize this happens? How many users know the community exists? How many users know the importance of liking an idea to prioritize it? How many users have created another issue that is more or less the same not realizing this particular issue is already in the list?

Note this has bugged me for my whole time on Spotify (more than 6 years) and I have just played with different settings trying to avoid the repetition. This is the first time I realized the issue on the community (Hopefully this is the one with the most votes, because a simple search came up with a bunch of similar posts)

I have programmed in the past and this seems like a rather rudimentary thing to address.

Please implement a true random shuffle. 

[mick-borneo]

Pretty ridiculous, I know.
There is a way to stop the Spotify algorithm from recommending the next song in your playlist . Go to settings, Playback. Make sure the Automix toggle is off.
This doesn’t remove Spotify‘s obligation to give us a real random feature. But it helps a little

[Shufflemyplaylists]

I agree - as a developer, I truly cannot imagine why this is not a toggle-able option. We've gotten people to the moon - just chose a random int, jeezuz

[rozeboosje]

"just chose a random int"

aaaaackshully....... It's not *that* simple. If you "just pick a random int" after playing a song, I illustrated in a small program many many pages ago in this thread that you'll start seeing "repeats" on average after about 100 items or so in a "list" with 1000 or so "items" in it.

But it isn't "hard" either. Shuffle, sure, there are videos online that illustrate that even the best "shuffle" algorithms will produce results that the consumer doesn't experience as "random". But that's why the solution here is not to tweak the "shuffle". The solution here is to implement something similar to Amazon Music's "randomize playlist". It treats the entire playlist as a giant "deck of cards" and shuffles that to produce a new order that is then persisted. After that you can play through the newly ordered playlist from top to bottom with (obviously) no repeats.

THAT would be simple.

[Macca3820]

Well said

It continues to boggle the mind that Spotify doesn't simply allocate this
task to a work experience kid and let us all have a proper random playlist
option

[wdh010]

YES, not hard, random and no repeats

[Eddie58]

This a big problem for me, since I is the app sometimes large portions of my workday. I hear the same songs every other day. 

[rozeboosje]

Well if you take some time to find out what sort of a person Daniel Ek is
you'll soon realise that he doesn't care two hoots about your disappointing
listening experience.

Do what many of us here have done: move to another streaming music
provider. There are a few choices, I'm sure one of them will suit your
needs and they don't have a total *bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep* for a CEO.

[Odd_Devil]

@bytebodger

Your link just opens my wifi info 😅