Make 'smart shuffle' its own button or toggle.

[bryanttom]

Make 'smart shuffle' its own button or toggle, or let us disable the feature entirely in the settings menu. It's frustrating having to toggle past smart shuffle to get to regular shuffle every time, especially as there is a slight delay where it has to pre-load the suggested music.

I also have no idea why smart shuffle takes priority over regular shuffle in the order. Surely more users prefer to use regular shuffle, which means we're being given an extra click for no reason. Good UI design is partially about getting from A to B in as fewer steps as possible.

Please fix this.

[ausgekotzt]

This and Jams...

[nadiosa]

PLEASE. YES. THIS. 

Mine turns itself back on after every song and it's driving me insane. I make my own playlists for a reason. This is making me want to go to another app for my music.

[nunoncastors]

I particularly enjoy the way its made my listening experience worse by being enabled by default and adding absolute trash to my usual playlists.

It's right up there with being endlessly nagged to buy duo and having to hunt around for features that used to be the first thing you see when you open the app but have since been hidden away in an attempt to make me interested in "courses" or the atrocious AI dj as my favourite new development in "corporate wonk thinks everyone will love this" land.

If you could just keep pumping more garbage into the service until I'm eventually motivated to move to one that just plays music and podcasts, that'd be great. It'll save me a tenner a month.

[SeeAScott]

I dislike smart shuffle intensely. I create playlists for a reason... to listen to songs I think go together.

The new music it plays is rarely something I actually want. I do like the feature at the bottom of the list for adding recommended songs... but its my choice to add them. That's the important point

Most important, smart shuffle makes selecting a new playlist while in the car difficult... I don't have time to read dialog boxes about whether its on or off etc. You could have at least made the icon look different like make it a blue light bulb or something obviously different like that.

[Darth_GTB]

@Dentyyy, there are a few people who do like it. If you scroll through the announcement post, you may find one person saying they like it for every 500 or so who dislike it. Also, you can see in that post that it has a couple dozen likes. Of course, when you compare the the thousands of comments hating on the feature, those likes are virtually irrelevant, but technically there are a few people who actually unironically like it

Conceptually, Smart Shuffle shouldn't be bad. It is a good feature on paper, but it was so terribly implemented that it forced me to use the web app even on mobile because the web app still uses the standard shuffle on the free tier.

When I say it's a good feature on paper, what I mean is that if it recommended songs that made sense in relation to the playlist, then it would be an amazing feature. The issue is that instead of that, they recommend songs that are popular in your country.

Even if it were correctly implemented, this feature has no right to call itself a shuffle. Technically speaking now that I think of it, even the standard shuffle shouldn't be called a shuffle. Because, what does shuffle mean? Take a deck of cards and shuffle it. You will never have repeating cards until you get to the end of the deck, reshuffle and start over. The standard shuffle is notorious to keep repeating the same songs over and over and smart shuffle even introduces "cards" that were never in the deck in the first place

[Iw00d]

Smart shuffle is only a feature so Spotify can feel fresh and engaging and at the forefront of the AI craze in board meetings. They should much rather work through the tickets and complaints and pay their 'programmers debt' to make the features that we pay for work better.

Forcing smart shuffle on us like this to boost user's engagement with the feature is in itself admitting that the feature sucks.

If I do want automatically generated playlists, there are many ways to get that – without stopping me from randomising the order of my self made playlists.

[paddlingupshitcreek]

Amen brother. And if you aren't careful, this setting will screw up your playlist and it takes a while to undo it. 

[gurusonwheels]

great idea wish you could use it on user created playlist as well .

[WaltJabsco]

Can you please tell me why your android app is such a mess when you select smart shuffle? When I select plain old normal shuffle, I still get tracks I didn't want. Please stop trying to push music on me I don't want to hear. Everyone I know who uses Spotify wants a way to deactivate smart shuffle permanently on there app, you community page is littered with requests for this to be a thing.

[Darth_GTB]

@WaltJabsco, I posted that one a few months back as a bug and they said it's because I was using the free version. It's BS, because on the web player as a free user I have access to the normal shuffle even on the free tier, so it shouldn't add tracks that aren't part of the playlist. In my case it's very easy to spot even if the song made sense, because the playlist in question was the liked songs playlist and I would get not liked songs from time to time. It seems to only happen in the mobile web app though and not on the desktop web app for some reason. It's still less bad than smart shuffle, so I'll stick with the web player for the time being