Announcements
The Spotify Stars Program: Celebrating Values Week!

Help Wizard

Step 1

NEXT STEP

Spotify Connect bug: Playlists only shuffle artists starting from 1 or 2 letters only

Spotify Connect bug: Playlists only shuffle artists starting from 1 or 2 letters only

Plan Premium

Country US

 

 

Device: Motorola Moto G5

Operating System: Android 8.1.0 (I also have Spotify for PC but I've not tried this bug from it yet)

 

This is an issue with Spotify Connect. I use SC for two contexts:

* Phone to my Sonos Connect (I control Spotify through my phone)

* Phone to Amazon Echo (we have Echos from multiple accounts in the house, and to connect to some not under my name requries Spotify Connect)

 

What happens:

I typically (ok, always) select a single Playlist I made with over 3k songs.

If I Shuffle the Playlist to play on the phone, Spotify will correctly select a variety of songs from all the artists in the playlists, as desired.

If I then go to 'Devices' and select my Sonos Connect or any of the Amazon Echo devices, I can actually see the Playlist order change. It changes to play artists from only 2 or 3 letters of the alphabet.

If I select the device first, and then hit the Shuffle Playlist button, the same happens where only a few small number of artists play.

 

Recent example: I connected my phone to the Sonos Connect, and Spotify would suddendly only play songs by Alestorm, Alice in Chains, and Angra. Only artists that start with A.

A couple of other times, I had artists starting with letters R and S I think.

 

I do not know if there's a limit to the songs quantity, since the song selection is already fairly small due to the artists limit.

 

Needless to say, this SEVERELY LIMITS the enjoyment I can get out of Spotify when not using it with the phone.

I've seen other reports of bugs on here, sometimes mentioning a sub-selection of 100 songs, but I've not yet seen documentation on this particular alphabet-driven issue. Thanks for any tips if you managed to fix this!

Pre_spotify_connect.png
Reply
12 Replies

The first picture shows the Playlist when I hit 'Shuffle' with the device being my own phone.

 

This picture shows what happens a couple of seconds after, once I hit 'Devices Available' and select my Sonos Connect. The Playlist changes, and note all the artists starting with the letter A (it's not always A, though recently it's been more in-pattern).

Post_spotify_connect.png

Hi,

I have the same problem with the shuffle. I have many playlists with 400 or more songs each.

I have realized that when you use spotify connect only 100 songs are transferred to your external device. Please see from https://support.spotify.com/is/using_spotify/features/shuffle/: "If you're using Spotify Connect or another wireless connection method to play from one device to another, it's possible only the first 100 tracks in the playlist are transferred to the other device, which means the shuffled tracks are only selected from those first 100 tracks."

 

I think this is crazy and very limiting. I am trying Apple Music and when I connect it to an external device it does not show this problem with the shuffle.

I hope spotify solve this very annoying issue otherwise I will stop my subscription.

 

Someone knows if Spotify is going to solve this stuff?

I'm having the same problem too! Same letter of song title. It really pisses me off! Especially when I want to have music I can work to. I will definitely be canceling my subscription if they don't fix this soon and they **bleep** well better refund me for the month if they can't! 

Hey @Pott@surgeonsprinces, and @loycastel,

 

When using Spotify Connect, tracks get queued in packs of 100. So if you have a big playlist and start to stream it, it's possible that only the first 100 tracks of the playlist are playing. You can get around this by toggling Shuffle (if you want) and choosing a random song in the middle of the playlist.

 

Hope this helps. Let us know if you have further questions.

 

Have a nice day.

What an awful solution for a paid subscription service.  Many people are having issues with this, and are extremely unhappy with it.

 

This is Spotify's solution?!?!?

This is hardly a satisfying reply.

 

This is a paid service. The least you could do is provide either of:

* Reason for not fixing and apologies OR

* Plan to fix and ETA

 

This is a customer-facing issue, to paid customers, for a product which is clearly not delivering. There are no restrictions to Playlists length and contents, so the 100 songs limit is on your side and not something we would know about.

 

If it's in the agreement of the Premium contract, feel free to prove me wrong and point it out.

Hi,

I am sorry but your "solution" it is not a solution. Choosing a song in the middle of my playlist every 10 minutes means that I have to shuffle manually and this is not acceptable.
Please ask your technicians to do that automatically: every 10 minutes you can make sure that the 100 songs to be shuffled change.

I just need to know if you can fix this issue or not. I am not a technician but I cannot think that this is a so big problem.  Surely it is very annoying for us, for your clients.

Hey folks,

 

Just to follow up on what @Guido said, there's an existing thread in the Community where we've told users that our tech team is aware of this and that they're currently investigating this.

 

Hope that helps!

 

Hey Peter (and the rest of Spotify),

 

Thanks for the reference. Are you able to explain why the status of the issue on that page is marked as "Closed" as opposed to "Under investigation"? That issue was posted August 2018 and I'd like to know if Spotify still plans on investigating the issue.

 

Also, given that this is a bug on Spotify Connect, could it be that the bug is on the side of the devices that are connecting to Spotify's API? I'm using Spotify Connect with Sonos and I'm wondering if Sonos is simply not making additional API calls to the playlist after getting the first 100 tracks.

 

To everyone else, here's one thing I do to make the broken shuffle suck slightly less. It only shuffles the first 100 tracks of the playlist, but how you have it sorted makes a difference. I set my playlists to be sorted by most recently added so it at least shuffles the newest 100 tracks in the playlist.

Hey @apaternite.

 

Thanks for your question.

 

As the status in the Idea mentions, we are indeed looking into this.

 

One of our Mods recently posted a useful Spotify Answer about this - make sure to check it out here.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks Peter. I added my vote to that ticket. Everyone else should too.

Really? This ticket (https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Connect-only-plays-100-song-chunks-of-playlists/idi-...) has been filed 3 years ago and it still isn't fixed?

I can't listen to music on my new sonos system without manually shuffling?  I am going to have to find a new streaming service if that is the case.  I want to hear bands that don't start with A.

Suggested posts