Plan
Premium
Device
Spotify Connect (tested) on Chromecast, naim Mu-so Qb from SGS9, Thinkpad x240, home-built desktop PC
Operating System
Tested on Android, Windows 10, Ubuntu 16.04
My Question or Issue
There are several problems when using Spotify Connect with a large playlist. My playlist is roughly 4500 songs and 290h long but I had the problem when it was around 3500 songs too. The most common use case for me is with an SGS9 connected to a naim Mu-so Qb speaker over our home wi-fi with Spotify Connect so the issues will be explained from that point of view below. Updating the Spotify app on the devices has not helped. The issues I experience are, elaborated on further down:
-1. Small shuffle sample
-2. Broken queue view
-3. Maximum one song queued at a time
-4. Unable to skip/change song
-5. Wrong song information
-1. Small shuffle sample
The shuffle feature does not work as it should, since it does not use the entire playlist or even a large portion of it for shuffling. Rather it uses a sample of 100-some random songs from the playlist that loop in the same order over and over.
-2. Broken queue view
When I queue songs there are a few issues with the queue view. Sometimes they do not show up in the queue view at all. Sometimes they show up and to some degree shuffle for a few seconds. Sometimes they show up but as multiple copies of the first song that is queued, for for instance if I queue 'song1', 'song2' and 'song3' you would expect the queue to look like
'song1'
'song2'
'song3'
But instead, it looks like
'song1'
'song1'
'song1'
This leads me to the next issue.
-3. Maximum one song queued.
The issues above with the queue view occur when opening the view for the first time. If you exit the queue view and re-open it, it will instead not show ANY songs queued at all. However, when the next song comes around it is in fact the most recently queued that is played, despite the queue view showing previously showing no songs queued. After that song, the previously queued songs are not played but the next song in the playlist/shuffle sample is played instead.
For example, suppose I queue 'song1', 'song2', and 'song3' (in that order) while 'songx' is the current song playing and 'songy' is the next one to be played outside the manual queue. I open the queue view once and one of the problems mentioned in -2. occurs. I close the queue view, then re-open it. No songs are shown to be queued. When 'songx' finishes playing, 'song3' will start playing. When 'song3' finishes playing, 'songy' will start playing. 'song1' and 'song2' are never played.
In short, the user experience is that you can only queue one song at a time and not know if it will play until it is supposed to be playing. Note that this is not always the case. It seems to happen randomly to some degree, since sometimes queuing multiple songs works fine.
-4. Unable to skip/change song
Very frequently I have the problem that I cannot skip song at all while casting with Spotify Connect. In other words there are essentially three issues here. One, pressing the skip forward/skip to previous/pause buttons does nothing. They stop responding completely under these conditions. Two, pressing a song in the large playlist has no effect whatsoever (i.e. I cannot choose a specific song to be played from the playlist). Three, I cannot press the 'Shuffle Play' button to get a new random song or shuffle sample.
The tedious workaround I have found is that I can disconnect from Spotify Connect and start playback locally on my device, start shuffle play/the song I want to play and THEN cast on Spotify Connect again. Problem is that when this is done, the problem of -4. comes back into play and the queue is completely cleared.
-5. Wrong song information
Very often when the problems above occur, I also have the problem that the song information being shown on my device (album cover, song name, song duration, current played time, artist name etc.) belongs to a different song. Sometimes it's the previous/next song, sometimes it's a song that is on the playlist but that has not been played recently or is about to be played, sometimes it's a song from another play context that I may have played earlier. It also tends to lag/stutter when I skip songs, making it more or less impossible to know how I should navigate to the song I want to hear.
Here are a few examples that show similar problems with big playlists, specifically concerning the shuffle sample size as described in -1. which occurs independently of Spotify Connect. This is also an issue that I have had for at least 4 years (back when the playlist was <2000 songs).
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/BUG-Within-large-playlists-shuffle-stops-working-as-...
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Shuffle-is-broken-on-big-playlists/td-p/1664984
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Shuffle-bug-for-large-playlists/idi-p/2450744
https://community.spotify.com/t5/iOS-iPhone-iPad/Shuffle-only-shuffling-small-subset-of-large-playli...
Hopefully, you can look into these issues and solve them to a sufficient degree ASAP. If you need more information, please let me know.
