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Shuffle play is not random

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Shuffle play is not random

Shuffle play was bad before the update and now its worse. On my 442 song playlist, the same 30 or 35 tracks play over and over again and the other 400 songs I have barely heard once. I have had to delete songs because shuffle play was choosing them everytime I would listen. Spotify developers say shuffle play is random but how is repeating the same 35 songs over and over random. For some reason there is a higher probability of certain songs playing than others. This is a major flaw in the system. The shuffle play programs needs to be totally overhauled, it is awful

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Spotify is certainly a pioneer in the streaming music environment and it provides a great service.
That said, the Spotify shuffle algorithim could definitely use attention, especially as it is soon to be competing with Apple's streaming music service. 

I used Apple's iTunes for years without thinking about the shuffle feature because it worked well. I have been a Spotify user for years and the Spotify shuffle feature has been problematic from the start:
– artists are played back to back
– many songs are never played, and
– some songs replayed frequently.

 

As Spotify's service stands out from Pandora because it allows users to listen to playlists and not only radio, shuffle is a particularly important feature. 

 

On additional note, the filter function for Artist and Album pages would be great to see again. I was glad to see it return to playlist pages. 

 

Keep up the good work, Spotify. Hope you can give the shuffle algorithim attention as soon as possible. 

if the quality of the Apple music service is good enough, I will switch to it. Nothing worse for me than when I am at the gym or on a long run to have to play with music becuase it is not playing in random order. I don't understand why spotify seems to do absolutley zero for this. They are litrerlally going to lose me as a paying subscriber because they cannot seem to implement a simple shuffle play that actually randomises the order in whcih the tracks are played. 

 

A little fristrating as my speaker has built in spotify support, but i have a sare IPAD that I can use with all notifications switched off, so as long as the streaming quality is good, looks like it will be my new solution (likely to go for family pack as there are two of us, so 2 subscriptions lost).

 

 

Yes, the thing is, Spotify doesn't offer "random" playback, it has "shuffle".

I do not think any of us wants random playback, per se. What the Spotify customers would really appreciate is random playback with no repeats until the entire playlist has finished; regardless of any automatic reset, by date expiry or whatever. Application updates would likely nullify such reset, which may be the catch.

I am hopeful Spotify will implement a shuffle with no repeats until playlist has finished. I, personally, am not interested in using itunes for casual music playback.

I just recently read that Spotify is valued at $8.5 billion with a B. Are you telling me a company that is that valuable can't come up with a decent shuffle play algorithm? I don't get it

ok but certain songs play all the time while other songs you never hear.  I would take random playback though. If I listen on shuffle then I dont care what songs play I just dont want shuffle to choose the same 30 songs everytime

Yeah the same 20 or 25 songs keep repeating over and over on my playlist of 160. Its really annoying

I'm convinced Spotify Shuffle is not random for business reasons... otherwise they would just fix it.  Its not that hard to program a real shuffle.  It must be more ecomomical for spotify to play the songs it constantly selects.

 

WORKAROUND:  turn off shuffle and sort your playlist by track name to nearly randomize your music yourself.  Unfortunately, songs can be thematically similar in a large playlest.  The other drawback is that I cant seem to hold this setting switching between devices so I always have to go back and re-sort by track name and manually pick a spot to start playing again.  Does Spotify intentionally make this difficult so it can play the songs it wants to play?  

 

I will continue to try other paid music services in search of a better one until Spotify fixes the problem.

 

 

I have a 215 song playlist that is 13 hours and 31 minutes long. I had been listening today, on shuffle play obviously, for a total of less than an hour and I heard the same song twice. That's ridiculous.

I was listening to my 215 song, 13 hour and 31 minute playlist today on shuffle. Within the first hour of listening, I heard two consecutive songs from the same artist twice in a row. The example is Song 1 from Artist A followed by Song 2 by Artist A followed by Song 3 from Artist B followed by Song 4 frome Artist B. Mind you, these aren't 2 artists that are strongly represented in my playlist. This is ridiculous. On a side note as has been repeated often, it seems that the shuffle play queues up the same 30 or so songs everytime  no matter how big the playlist is. Come on guys, this is just silly

I just joined Apple Music after years of being with Spotify.

 

The reason is that I want to try out how good their 'shuffle' service will be. I am SO fed up with Spotify's poor attempt.

 

If I want to shuffle my songs, I don't want Spotify to select 5% of my library and then shuffle that - I want actual shuffle.

 

They need to get this right or they will lose more people like me who have been loyal for years.

 

Step up and earn your money Spotify - we want you to be as good as you can be.

ollyfarrow, would you please return to this forum and give us your impression of Apple Music, especially regarding the shuffle functionality?

 

I'm also fed up with Spotify about it, and will switch if Apple Music behaves well!

 

Thanks

Andreas

 

Shuffle play is still repeating the same 20 or so songs over and over smh

Ok so I was listening to my 215 song playlist, which is about 13 hours long, for several hours yesterday. What I noticed is not only does shuffle play pick the same 25 or 30 songs everytime you start listening, these songs repeat themselves as well. So basically, there are about 160 to 170 songs on my playlist that I will never hear. What?!?!?!

They over thought this new system, nobody cares about the same artist, but rather the same song.

The main issue with this system is it seems to play the same songs alot, I have a 200 song playlist and i rarely hear some songs.

I think they should take your playlist and keep track of which songs were played and which ones werent. A simple boolean expresssion can be ussed if you give a song a true/false(1,0) state when it is played, and if people want a certain song to play more they should be able to click a favorite/star button.

1. Give each song a "Was played" state, set this state to false everytime the play button is clicked on playlist

2.Randomly pick song, detect whether "was played" is true/false, if false play song, if true, randomly pick another song

3. after everytime a song is randomly selected check the states on all songs(high performance only)and if they are all true reset them all to false, for low performance devices, keep a count of how many songs were played, check if that number is equal to the number of songs on the playlist (each time a song is randomly selected) and if the number of songs played == number of songs in playlist, reset all songs sates to false

4. for high performance devices make a favorite function so that a song can play a certain number of times before its state is set to true, but only if the user selects the favorite button for individual songs

That is how i think this system should work

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Garage band what do you think of this, this is how i think the system should work, the only issue is this would take alot of resources for say a 800 song playlist, not sure if computer can handle this

I literally have THOUSANDS of songs and yet i still here the same hundred or so songs when I shuffle through all songs. This is absolutely ridiculous. I speed skipped through shuffle for a long time and I kept seeing many many songs pop up multiple times. How on earth do you mess that up???? Why would songs be repeated when it is on shuffle..... Make it so that when you shuffle, it's like shuffling through your music on an ipod. This is really annoying considering I'm also paying for this as well?

If you think about it, if a list is completely random, some songs will be played multiple times while other doesn't.


@depechemode wrote:
If you think about it, if a list is completely random, some songs will be played multiple times while other doesn't.

But this is shuffle, not random.

 

Like I mentioned earlier, assign every song in a playlist a number. That way, you already solve the problem of duplicate songs. Simple change the order of the numbers, and done.

Deleting Spotify and re-installing it helps, for a while. Then it is back to repetition. Here is another solution that works for me:
When you quit Spotify, click the “pause” button first. When you start Spotify, either click the start button to begin where you left off or scroll through your songs and pick a song that you haven’t heard for a while (or ever), and start playing that song. It works for me and is not too onerous to perform.

I have now switched to Apple Music becuase they have a shuffle play function that actually works. Spotify doesn't listen to their customers. I have been complaining about this issue for almost a year and a half

The problem with algorithms is that they eventually repeat themselves if there is not a checking service, which stops a track that has been played in a list to be played again. But, this solution would need to log all the lists on spotify, and would create an huge amount of data.

 

Instead of this Spotify should

 

Use something similar to the following. Take the number of songs in a list as the entry point then let a calculator multiply this figure with the current time (what the computer clock stands at in terms of minutes and seconds) in terms of minutes, then multiply again with the figure the seconds are at. This would provide the real random as the clock is not repetitive. 

 

So let this be the formula for the shuffle algorithm:

 

(numbers of songs in a list) X (current minute count on the computer) X (current seconds count) = A real shuffle!

 

Actually use what ever, but let the local computer clock be involved in the shuffle algorithm. If something in the algorithm isnt changing songs will be repeated. An algorithm need to be alive - the clock is the answer.

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