After working with two different Spotify Tech support staff over the last 3 days, here is what I have learned from them, inferred from our email exchanges and concluded about the issue of limited shuffle when streaming large playlists using the Spotify Connect feature. I will only address this issue and how it affects me since I can't speak for others and can only relate to my own personal experiences, even though the conclusions are probably applicable across other experiences, e.g. those using Chromecast, which I think is mentioned in this thread. If any of this is repititious from others' posts, I apologize.
My setup: Spotify app installed on an iPad mini; an AppleTV 4th gen., a Spotify Connect and Airplay enabled AV Receiver; a 3,697 song Spotify playlist.
When I play this large playlist directly on the iPad mini, it appears to shuffle all songs randomly. When I select and start the playlist in shuffle mode, the Spotify app creates an 80+ song queue and begins playing the first song in the queue. I verify this by opening the queue and see that the first 80+ songs are clearly random, selected from all over my playlist. As the first or top song in the queue finishes the next song begins to play and another randomly chosen song is added to the bottom of the queue thus maintaining the 80+ song, randomly generated queue.
When I play this same large playlist on the iPad mini then use Airplay to stream it to my AppleTV which is connected to my AVR, it works exactly the same as playing it directly on the iPad min. This makes sense because it is being streamed from my iPad mini to the AppleTV over my LAN and it’s as if it is actually being played on the iPad mini. Since my AVR is also Airplay enabled, I can also stream the playlist from the iPad mini, through my LAN, directly to the AVR thus eliminating the AppleTV from the mix. Same result: flawless, random shuffle play.
When I play this same large playlist on the iPad mini then use the Spotify Connect feature to stream it through my Denon AVR, I see a 100 song queue created that is derived from only the first 100 songs on the playlist. There is a slight randomness to the queue, but many are in the same sequence as they are in the playlist.
Spotify admits that there is a 100 song queue limit imposed when using the Connect feature. That is, from the point where it selects the first song, it chooses and shuffles only the next 99 songs in the playlist from which to build the queue. This is the heart of the problem.
When not using the Spotify Connect feature, I conclude that the Spotify app is managing the shuffle feature on the native device, my iPad mini. When the Spotify Connect feature is being used, I surmise that the streaming is ‘handed off’ to the Spotify servers which stream the music via the internet and my LAN to my AVR thus taking the iPad mini, and consequently, the Spotify app out of the mix. Therefore, when the Spotify app is processing the shuffle, it works great but when it is handed off directly to the servers via Connect the 100 song limitation is imposed. These limitations on the size of the queue that is created using Connect may be due to bandwidth and storage considerations with the servers.
I’m not sure all of my inferences and conclusions are correct so invite others input to help us all better understand this issue and encourage Spotify to come up with a more elegant solution.
As for me, from this point forward, even though it requires another step in the initiation process, I will be using the Airplay feature on my AVR to play my large playlists. Another option would be to download large playlists and play them offline, where the app will shuffle them for you. Large playlists however consume copious amounts of storage so unless you have something like an iPad Pro 1TB or similar Android device, this may not be feasible. If you are like me, I chose Spotify Premium because it is a relatively inexpensive music streaming service with a huge selection of music and decent (320 kps) sound quality. To invest $1,000 in a device capable of storing your music locally would make the choice of Spotify less appealing. Alternatively, it would be nice if Spotify would allow us to choose the storage location for downloaded files so those of us who have NAS (network attached storage) could store music files there and allow the Spotify app to control the shuffle. I have a 4 TB Western Digital MyCloud that would work fantastic for this.
In conclusion, I sent the Spotify techs the link to this forum thread in hopes that they will review it and come up with a solution that allows the full use of the Connect feature without shuffle limitations.
Staff / Moderator/ 3 years ago in Social & Random