[All Platforms][Other] Button on play queue to shuffle current selections

[zardox]

Currently, in the panel "Playing from play queue" below "Now playing," if there are any selections queued, there is a listing titled "Next in Queue" with one option "Clear Queue".

My request - 

Add an additional button labeled "Shuffle", have it appear only if there is more than one selection in the queue. Pressing this "shuffle" button does a random sort of the selections currently in the queue.

Note : selections below in the "Next from" section are not included, no change is made to their order.

I need this because I routinely make a selection of singles and albums from several artists but I want then to shuffle the selections. This is kind of like building a playlist on the fly.

1. An alternate idea would be to have a button that transfers selections in the queue to a playlist. But that is less preferable because I don't want a new playlist to be added

[Henpemaz]

Hi.

This is a much much wanted bug-fix. Sometimes you just want to listen to this, and this, and a bit of that today, and you want it shuffled.

But when playing from the Queue, the shuffle button does nothing.

Something clearly isn't working. Either this is a shuffle bug, and the shuffle should work, or it's a UI bug, and the shuffle option should appear as "disabled", but then that would just be a much much wanted feature.

For now, the work around is to:

1. Create a new playlist
2. For each song/album that you want to play, right click it and, instead of clicking "add to queue", find the playlist you've created and add the song to that playlist.
3. Play the playlist and use the shuffle function as much as you want.
4. Do not forget to delete your playlist after you're done, or you'll end up with a lot of disposeable playlists on your library.

Quite the lenghty workaround for what could be solved by the press of a button.

A short insight on how that could be implemented:

Spoiler

Use two data structures for the queue, one shuffled and one un-shuffled.
When shuffle is turned on:
	if playing from queue:
		create shuffled_queue (empty)
		add all songs after current song into shuffled_queue
		shuffle shuffled_queue
		start playing from shuffled-queue
	else:
		proceed as usual

When shuffle is turned off:
	if playing from queue:
		find current song in queue
		start playing from queue at that position
		discard shuffled_queue
	else:
		proceed as usual

When adding songs to the queue:
	if shuffle is off:
		add songs to the end of queue
	if shuffle is on:
		add songs to the end of queue
		add songs to shuffled_queue
		shuffle shuffled_queue again

 Edit:
To be honest, this is just part of a much bigger set of quality-of-life improvements and bug-fixes regarding the Queue that should be brought to Spotify. I'll just mention a few that quickly crossed my mind:

1. You cannot add Playlist to the Queue - you cannot queue up several short playlists
2. You cannot add Artists to the Queue -  same as above
3. You cannot shuffle your queue - this is a killer. I just want to shuffle a few different albums every day, man.
4. Trying to re-order songs on a big queue is very slow and unresponsive.

Every single offline music player has this. Now that you are a respectable online music player, you shouldn't allow yourself to stay behind on QoL features like that.

[Tosh3030]

This is something that I had in Rhapsody/Napster that I really liked.  Just threw a bunch of playlists in the queue, then shuffled.  Spotify will shuffle within the first playlist, then move to the next playlist and shuffle those.  Well, that stinks b/c most of my playlists are by artist.  How hard can this change be in the code?  Just expand the shuffle based on the entire queue.  BTW - Hempenaz(sp) had a great post about this...

[TimRainier]

Nevermind that we can't shuffle between playlists, the shuffle inside a
single playlist doesn't even work right. Take a look, if you shuffle a
playlist, close spotify and then come back to it later, the shuffle will
play the songs in the exact same order they were played before. Some users
have mentioned that you can play with the sorting of the play list to get
around this, but that is actually not true. Regardless of how you sort your
songs in the playlist, the shuffle playlist feature will play the songs in
the same order each and every time.

I would simply like the songs to play in a completely random order each and
every time. How hard could it be?

[Tosh3030]

Update - so I made a new playlist, consisting of 4 other playlists, all based on artist.  Total of 113 songs by 4 different artists, so an average of 28 songs (give or take some from each list).  I clicked on a song and clicked on the shuffle icon.  It followed the same pattern - it would shuffle through the songs of one of the artists, then through the next artist, as if the new playlist was aware that the songs were from 4 other playlists.  I then resorted the list by song name, but the same pattern was followed.  I stopped the program, restarted, and began the play function again.  The pattern continued, UNTIL I clicked on the Next icon for about 30 clicks.  Finally, a little bit of shuffling did occur.  I do understand that true shuffling of 113 songs by 4 artists will result in the same artist being played somewhat repeatedly, but not 10 songs in a row.  That's a 10% focus on one playlist, which isn't a great representation of randomness.

[Sagehorn]

The problem is, that spotify has a special concept with the separation of "queue" and "next to play".

I was never sure why they implemented both, maybe because its optimized for mobilephone use... On PC its lot easier to arrange complex playlists by mouse. But on the other hand, its not logical, that the queue is not shuffle-able.. Its just not smart... I'd rather live without the combination of "queue" and "next to play" but have a better play-management (where to put the selected tracks into the playlist.)

Best for me would be:

- You can select in options what happens when you click on a song. (play now/play at next/play at last)

- You can "right click" on a song and select if you wanna play now/play at next/play at last)

- Perhaps it's also not clear what should happen if you click "play next" for more than one songs after another. But it's also an important question ;). Will the last song be first, Or the first? Is it possible to put another song behind at all etc....

But now its actually not perfect 😉

[Jacob]

Edit: This idea has been reposted here.

Updated on 2019-10-08

Your idea has been submitted a while ago but unfortunately hasn't gathered enough kudos (100 per year). In order to keep an overview of the active & recent ideas in this forum, we will have to close this idea for now. However, this does not mean that your idea has been rejected by Spotify.

If you still feel strongly about your request, we encourage you to post your idea again, in a slightly different form! Maybe now is the right time to receive the support of the community for your suggestion! 😉

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[CreamyGoodness]

I saw that this has been posted about at least twice, once in 2012 and once in 2018. It amazes me how this hasnt been implemented yet.

I recently switched from Google Play Music to Spotify. How is it that the least popular music streaming service can do this but the most popular cant?

Here's an example:

I'm listening to an album and want to listen to another album. If I add it to the queue I'd have to listen to the whole first album in order before I can listen to the next album. 

Theres times where I want to listen to several albums and it gets really annoying having to listen to them in order or even dragging songs around to try and shuffle it myself. 

Additionally, itd be nice to have a "shuffle albums" option under "my library". Maybe something where I can select multiple albums from my library and shuffle them, instead of having to add each one to the queue.

But for the love of god, just let us shuffle the queue. Its embarrassing that Google Play Music has this edge over you guys.

[osornios]

Updated on 2019-12-10

Marked as new idea, which is a repost of this inactive idea.

[Tosh3030]

Absolutely needs to change.  This is too simple NOT to do.

[gas163]

This is the number one hindrance to the way I'd prefer to listen to music on Spotify.  Every few months, after I've been sufficiently aggravated by deleting the songs in my temporary "Shuffle Me" playlist and adding the 4 to 5 albums I'd like to shuffle this time, I search the internet for any signs that shuffling the queue on Spotify might one day become an option.  I then find all of the others that are equally frustrated by the same issue.  I then cast my vote for this idea, yet again, despite the fact that somehow its identified as a NEW IDEA???  I don't get it.  

I guess I'll start another 30 day free trial of another streaming service and maybe this will be the time.