Smart shuffle breaks if you interact with it.

[Myself_]

Plan

Premium

Device

Desktop PC

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

I have multiple issues that gets annoying to deal with.

1. If i currently use smart shuffle and listening to the suggested song and decide to click either "Add to Liked Songs" or "Remove Recommendation", then the entire playlist will reshuffle after the action has taken effect.

From my understanding, "Add to Liked Songs" should simply add the song to my liked song list, and "Remove recommendation" should remove the suggested song from the queue and possible future recommendation for that playlist. However the entire queue re-shuffles instead.

2. If you click "Remove Recommendation", then smart shuffle will stop adding suggestions a lot of the time.

It will turn itself into a normal shuffle playlist instead of a smart shuffle playlist.

3. Smart shuffle stops adding recommendation as you progress towards ~220 songs deep into the list. This only becomes a problem if you listen to a list for multiple sessions or if you spend 15+ hours listening.

4. When you run out of smart shuffle songs, or it decides to stop the smart shuffle because you told them to remove a song with the "Remove recommendation" option.

Then the playlist will simply function as a normal shuffle playlist, however it still shows the smart shuffle icon as active.

[AlejaR]

Hey @Myself_,

Thanks for posting in the Community and welcome.

In this case, we'd suggest performing a clean reinstall of the app. By doing that, the app can be up-to-date, and you can make sure any damaged cache is not leading to this issue. You can find out the steps to do it here.

Nonetheless, if this doesn't do the trick, we'd like to gather additional info to better understand what's happening:

• Send us the exact Spotify version you're running on your computer.
• Has the app always been behaving like this or did it start to happen after a specific event such as an OS update?
• Does this happen no matter what playlist you choose to play? Does it happen more regularly if the playlist contains more than 200 songs?
• Send us a video recording of what's happening on your side. You can attach the video in your next reply in mp4 format, or you can also upload it to YouTube or Google Drive and make it public, so we can visualize it.

Keep us in the loop!

[Myself_]

Spotify version 

Spotify for Windows (64 bit)
1.2.39.578.g0ea3f38b

--

Smart shuffle stops working when clicking Remove recommendations.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BvtBY0iDit-0YOtTrf_DvKUrr29MJGKf/view?usp=sharing

Liking a song reshuffles the playlist. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nHp3jmyrNaEQfa19rypFOdMAftlfa89R/view?usp=sharing

Smart shuffle runs out of recommendations. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1axu-dH5myw0NwE1LmUevtyBOd_w7ZWek/view?usp=sharing

Graphical bug - Smart shuffle icon remains active without any recommendations. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11LCONOzPI9x51uKprozDo_uEaEac2VgH/view?usp=sharing

The app has always behaved like this, or as long as I've utilized smart shuffle. 

It happens less frequently when I play small playlists. But I want to listen to Spotify through my Liked song list which is currently at 5000+ songs, as it allows me to listen to a much broader selection of songs. 

[OscarDC]

Hey @Myself_,

Thank you for keeping in contact and for the shared info.

To continue investigating this issue, would you mind confirming if performing a clean reinstall of the app, as suggested by @AlejaR makes any difference or not?

Also, could you have someone log in with their account on your device - such as a friend or a family member, to see if the issue persists? 

We'll be on the lookout. 

[Myself_]

I did perform a clean reinstall, did not change anything.

I logged in on my freemium alt account and the "Remove recommendation" and "Add to liked songs" button worked as designed. They did not stop or reshuffle the queue.

When I logged back into my premium main account, the bug still remained. 

--

However i found some new bugs on my alt account. I would not get any recommendations amongst the first 50~ songs, but after that it would work as normal. If I clicked "Add to liked songs", then next time i started a Smart shuffle it would frontload recommendations. Every time i clicked "Add to liked songs" from those recommendations, it would add 2 more songs. 

Video of incident.

First 1 minute of video is about showing that Add to liked song and Remove recommendation works as intended on my alt account. 

The last part of the video shows the bug (1:00-2:20)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_HFiu1XbiBWMh62WRkMFQIfgvQq-ahcr/view?usp=sharing

[Maria]

Hey @Myself_,

Thanks for the reply and for the additional details!

We've passed the info you've provided us with on, so that it can be looked into further. We'll let you know if we have any news to share.

Should anything else appear in the meantime, let us know. Cheers!

[uintptr]

Spotify for Windows (64 bit)
1.2.43.420.gc7b23f70 on one device

Plan

Premium

Country

Device

PC and laptop

Operating System

Windows 10 + Debian Linux + Android 11

My Question or Issue

When using smart queue within a playlist, if you add the song recommended by smart queue to the same playlist, the queue will get replaced with new shuffle.

Also additional issue: If I start playing with shuffle on playlist A, multiple times, the queue is the same each time. The pseudo-random number generator's (I assume is behind the shuffle feature) seed seems to be constant

[kitashestakov]

Plan

Premium

Country

Kazakhstan

Device

iPhone 15 Pro, MacBook Pro M1 (2020)

Steps to reproduce the issue:

1. Start listening to any song in Favourite Tracks playlist with the recommended shuffle on

2. Add any recommended song to Favourite Tracks by clicking "+" button

3. Once liked song is over the playlist starts all over again from the very first song that was played. All the next tracks are 90 % identical to the initial playlist

Here's an example of the initial playlist:

Song A

Song B

Song C

Song D* (recommended)

Song E

I listen to Song A, Song B, Song C, and Song D. I like the Song D, this action triggers my queue to rearrange, so the new playlist is:

Song A

Song B

Song C

Song D* (recommended)

Song A

Song B

Song X (a few new ones appear too)

Song E

I've tried restarting apps on both of my devices, it didn't help at all since the recommended queue is made on Spotify's server side.

This is super frustrating since the playlist gives me all the same songs over and over again and it makes the recommended shuffle an unusable feature.

[Ryan77_]

So I recently had to upgrade to the current version of Spotify while I previously had updates turned off for Spotify because I didn't like any of the updates that had been coming out. I was running on a version of Spotify from late 2022/early 2023, but I had to upgrade due to getting a new phone. Besides all the horrible UI changes, the big problem for me is the fact that shuffle Play basically doesn't work anymore. On my old phone on the older version it worked fine, I would shuffle and it would start playing songs almost instantly. With this new version on my new Phone with a better processor, it has taken up to four minutes to start playing when I shuffle my liked songs. It will start/stop whatever song I'm currently playing, not allow me to do almost anything in the app, basically freezing it for the time being and will not stop playing audio, even if I enter another app and have audio playing from said app, until it actually starts playing the shuffleled songs. Im using the same exact settings as I did on my old phone and nothing was ever a problem over there. To say I'm very disappointed is an understatement, it's completely unacceptable for me to pay $100 every year for this app and have them continuously make destructive updates to ruin the app all the way down to one of its most used and crucial functions (shuffle). Also in general getting a song to play takes much longer that it did before, no matter where I am, wifi or mobile data, it doesn't matter. it's slow and sluggish. I've tried the whole nine of clearing cache, data, uninstalling, taking away local files, logging out of all devices. Nothing works.

Device

Google Pixel 4A 5G

[an_schwarz]

I have the same Shuffel issues. Shuffel Button sometimes working, sometimes not. App gets badder and badder. Reinstallation does not help. Notification Sound Control also not working for me.

[an_schwarz]

I've downgrade to version 8.7 and all fine now.

[Ryan77_]

I'm gonna have to figure out how to do that. It's been years since I downgraded an app

[smaho]

Plan

Premium

Country

Norway

Device

Samsung S22

Operating System

Android 14

My Question or Issue

If I start a playlist in normal order and change to shuffle, the app will change to the next song by itself. Usually the change to the next song only happened the second I locket my phone with the lock-button, but now it has started happening even while I'm still using the app. 

When it happens I can go back into the app again, queue the song I missed and lock the phone without anything happening. So it seems it is the changing of playback-order that triggers the bug. 

Anybody know how to fix this? It's not the worst bug, but it can get a bit irritating in the long run.

[KillswitchEdge]

Plan

Premium

Country

Germany

Device

PC

Operating System

Windows 11

My Question or Issue

While the feature has been divisive, Smart Shuffle has been great for me to discover new songs and bands similar to the ones I listen to. The issue is, whenever I hear a new song and want to add it to the playlist I'm listening to, the entire Queue repeats from the very beginning, which appears to be some randomly seeded choices that persist through restarts.

I've tried clearing the cache, turning off both AutoPlay and AutoMix, even reinstalled the app from scratch and none of it helps. The issue is that this behaviour is only present with the Smart-Shuffle, regular Shuffle seems unaffected by it.

Steps to Reproduce (Windows App):
1 - Open a playlist and open the Queue sub-window so you can see what's next. Look at the songs it's listing.
2 - Turn Smart Shuffle off, just use regular Shuffle, and double-click a song in the playlist.
3 - Note here that the entire queue will change within 0.2 seconds or so. This is good!
4 - Turn on Smart Shuffle by clicking the Shuffle button twice (once to turn Shuffle off, the second to turn on Smart Shuffle.)
5 - Note the order of the queue again.
6 - Now double-click any song in your playlist, even the one you're already playing.
7 - Note that the only songs which change are every 3rd song, which is a Smart-Shuffle song. It will also take at least 1 second to update. This is likely due to it sourcing songs to add, but could be relevant info.

8 - Note the first song in your "Next from: Playlist" section.
9 - Click Next a few times to cycle through your playlist in the Queue order.
10 - Note that you'll progress through the queue as normal.
11 - Double-click another song in the playlist OR Add the Smart-Shuffle song to your Playlist.
12 - The entire queue resets back to the beginning, playing the first song from step 8.

This isn't that hard to reproduce, it should take an engineer very little time to identify the cause and possibly even fix it, but it's been a problem for a very long time now. It's been in the program for over a year at least, and is making Smart Shuffle incredibly tedious for even those of us who actually like it.

I don't want to sit here doing stuff on my computer, hear a song that's new and go "Oh that's cool, I want to add that to this playlist" and then have to listen to all the same songs again with only every 3rd song being a new one.

[iRizzo24]

I've got this issue too, and it's really annoying. I've noticed it since smart shuffle has been released and everyone has got it, so it's a common problem.

I'm waiting Spotify to fix it and make smart shuffle "smart" for real. Its behaviour should be equal at all to the normal shuffle, with the addition of some other random songs. Nothing more.