Classical Albums without shuffle, PLEASE?

[JMinSF]

I love Spotify, but it's really tough to be a classical music lover here. For classical pieces, each track is a movement, and the movements are intended to be performed/played in order. Albums are shuffled by default, and with the long track names in a classical album cut off by the app, it's not possible to verify (after turning off shuffle) that the tracks are being played in the correct order. In my experience, sometimes this procedure (touch the first track in the track list for the album, turn off shuffle) sometimes works, but sometimes does not. 

Just being able to see the entire track name would certainly help!

Has anyone found a solution, even a partial solution, to this?

[DasPeter]

Hello @JMinSF!

Do you have a Premium subscription?

[JMinSF]

I do, yes. I've had one for a long time. Do you have some ideas?

[Jason]

Hey @JMinSF

Thanks for reaching out to us.

Which device are you using Spotify on? We'd recommend making sure that you don't have Shuffle play button switched on. This will be 2 entwined arrows towards the bottom right of the desktop app, or on the Now Playing screen on mobile devices. Do you see it?

How does that help? Let us know, we'd love to help!

Jason.

[JMinSF]

Thanks, Jason, I *do* know about the shuffle-play icon. My complaint is that it seems to default to shuffle. Not 100% of the time, but I've been unable to figure out when it does/doesn't do this. I'm using Spotify on my iPhone 6.

When I pull up a playlist (let's say the playlist is a single classical album), I see a list of the tracks (and the tracks have names that are indistinguishable from one another because of the shortening of the track names that I described in my first email). I touch the first track to start to play, and most of the time, I'll then find on the next screen that the shuffe icon is turned on (green). Sometimes the track I touch (the first track, meaning the first movement of the piece) is where playback actually starts and I can quickly turn off the green shuffle icon and listen to the piece with movements in the correct order. Sometimes however, even though I touch the first track to start playback, the album will actually start to play on (say) the third track. If I know the piece, I can fix it quickly; if I don't know the piece, though, I won't know that the playback didn't start with the first movement. 

This problem can easily be solved if (a) the default were not shuffle and/or (b) there were some way to look at the entire name of the track. I don't understand why these options aren't available, since Spotify does maintain a library of classical pieces. It's frustrating!

[Jason]

Thanks for getting back to me, @JMinSF

If the Shuffle icon on the Now Playing screen isn't highlighted, the tracks should play in order that they are listed. Have you noticed this happen since a particular update, or a change on the device? For example an update to the iOS.

We'll be sure to pass your feedback and your handy suggestions on to the developers. They do love a bit of feedback 🙂

[JMinSF]

​First -- I appreciate your working with me on this, Jason.

No, I haven't noticed any pattern. Certainly it happens far more often than iOS updates.

And your saying "...the tracks should play in the order that they are listed" is the crux of the problem -- with track names shortened, each track looks exactly like each other track, so there is no way to know what order they are being played in unless I happen to know the piece.

For example, here are the track names for the piano concerto I'm listening to right now:

"Piano Concerto No. 4 in G..."

"PIano Concerto No. 4 in G..."

"Piano Concerto No. 4 in G..."

"PIano Concerto No. 4 in G..."

Please let me know if you have any other ideas. Thanks again.

[Jason]

You're very welcome, @JMinSF

I understand your frustration regarding this. Right now the tracks will appear and play as provided to us. I will of course pass your comments/feedback on to our content team. Hopefully we'll be able to make this easier in the future.

In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts and ideas to this page: https://community.spotify.com/t5/New-Ideas/ct-p/newideas. The more Kudos and support your idea gets, the more likely our developers will implement a change. I'd also recommend to check on whether there's a similar idea in the Ideas board. That way you can collaborate ideas and increase your Kudos power 🙂

Let me know if you have any questions.

Jason.

[JMinSF]

Jason, thanks again.

FYI, the full track names appear in the desktop app in the actal description of the album. Once playlisted, however, the track names are truncated. They're shortened in the desktop app, and shortened even further for the iOS version.

I'll add this to the New Ideas page, as you suggest. However, my guess is that there aren't enough of us classical music lovers out there to get very many endorsements of the idea. 

I will, however, give it a try! And hope that someday, there will be a Spotify for classical music. Maybe it'll be Spotify! 🙂

John

[hawksndspit]

I immediately lost interest  Spotify for just this reason. I won't be logging in again and have deleted the app.

[Bry4d]

This question seems to touch on several orthogonal but related sub-questions:

Q1. "How do you turn off shuffle"?  Already addressed in this thread: in short, premium subscription required, and just need to find the right UI button.

Q2. "How can you see which movement is which in classical pieces where the long name always gets cut off somewhere in the piece name?"  This is a persistent issue that I experience too.  I would love if Spotify could have separate metadata sub-fields for "piece" and "movement" names (or just "name part 1" and "name part 2") or something like that, so that when used each part of the name gets 50% of the available space and truncated separately: e.g., "Symphony No.1 In... 1. Un poco..." (truncated piece name followed by truncated movement name) instead of just a longer truncated piece name "Symphony No.1 In C Minor, Op...").

Q3. "How do you keep shuffle play from mangling classical pieces by not keeping movements together?"  This is a related issue that really needs to be fixed too, addressed in these separate threads and feature requests: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Playlists-Ability-to-link-together-Tracks-in-Playlists/i... and (more directly expressed for classical music) https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Music-Shuffling-multi-movement-classical-works/idi-p/1...

[QannoQ]

Still not fixed, after all these years.