Songs do not play if clicked if after last smart shuffle song

[eschurma]

Plan

Premium

Country

Usa

Device

(iPhone Xs max

Operating System

iOS 15.4.1 (is latest)

My Question or Issue

I have a playlist with around 600 songs. If I click smart shuffle, a bunch of new songs are added (the replacement to “enhance”). If I scroll down past the last added song, songs never play if I click them. Songs before do play. If I turn off smart shuffle the songs play just fine. Clearly a bug. 
note- the playlist is downloaded. 

[Yordan]

Hi @eschurma!

Could you share a short screen recording which shows this behavior in action? That way we can get a clear understanding of what's happening on your end. Feel free to also let us know what troubleshooting you've tried so far so we avoid repeating the steps.

We'll be on the lookout for your reply.

[eschurma]

Sure. But first - this system should allow uploads in MOV format, since it's the native IOS screen video capture format. I spent 1 minute capturing the video, then over an hour trying to figure out how to convert it to an acceptable format, finding it had a 5MB limit, trying to edit and compress it down, then giving up and just uploading to dropbox. 

Here is a public dropbox video link that should work. 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/blkx6i7qb6ttye0/RPReplay_Final1651071333.mp4?dl=0

In this video I 

Started by entering a playlist

Showing that a song plays

Turning on smart shuffle

Showing the first several songs play

Scrolling to the bottom of smart shuffle inserted songs

Showing the last 3 play before the last smarts shuffle

When I click on the last smart shuffle song, it stops playing. 

All other songs after that in the list also don’t work

I then click on a song before the last inserted smart shuffle item and it works

Clicking after it stops playback again

[Vasil]

Hey @eschurma,

Thanks for the detailed description!
In order to rule out any app defects on your end, would you mind performing a clean reinstall first to see if this changes anything?
Also please let us know if you've tried any other troubleshooting steps so far.

We'll be on the lookout for your response 🙂
Cheers!

[eschurma]

Thanks - I used to be a software tester so try to be thorough.
I followed the instructions for the clean reinstall.
The exact same thing happens - no difference.
Note that when I reinstalled, the songs in the playlist were (of course)
no longer downloaded, so the issue seems independent of whether the
playlist is locally downloaded or not.

[Vasil]

Hey @eschurma,

Thanks for letting us know!
In this case, we'd recommend checking with support if this could maybe be account related.
Such errors could be caused by your cached data on Spotify's end.

[eschurma]

I’m a software developer, and that explanation doesn’t make much sense. This is pretty clearly a bug in the app, almost certainly inside the IOS app. Is this not the right place to report a bug? How can this get escalated to the software/support people?

[Jeremy]

Hi there @eschurma,

Thank you for your reply.

We've tried to replicate the same behavior without any success so to start with, we recommend that you contact our customer support that's mentioned above so that they can have a closer look backstage and see if it's account related or not.

Let us know how it goes.

Have a great continued weekend!

[eschurma]

Support was pretty frustrating. 2.5 hours of my life down the drain on this tonight - and more like 5-6 hours total, just to get a bug reported.

First tier support didn't read the link I supplied after telling them everything was explained there, asked for a screenshot when there is a video in this thread, and after a bunch of other incompetence I asked to be passed to a second tier support.

Tier 2 support was also problematic. The told me to install versions of IOS that don't exist, then versions of Spotify that don't exist. They did ask me to do a BUNCH of various types of testing. Tier 2 confirmed that it is a new feature and not available to everyone, making reproducing it harder, and also lending credence to my theory that it is a software bug in this new feature being tested. They didn't know of anything they could do on their end to fix anything on the back end account, like you'd mentioned. After more than 2 hours I was finally passed on to a tier 3 support.

Tier 3 read the details and agreed with what I have been saying from the start, that it looks like a software bug and they will log it to the appropriate developer, and they took my contact info for it.

I'm extremely frustrated that it's so hard to get a bug reported even when it's very obviously a bug.