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To be fair, I’ve caught spotify giving me the same shuffle order several times. If i stop a playlist and start it later in the day it will sometimes give me 10 or so songs in the exact order I’d already heard them. It does the same if i search a song and let shuffle fill it in the rest, the next fews songs are usually predictable. My most used playlist has nearly 70hrs of music so i suspect this is some algorithm error or bug.
Spotify shuffle has been awful for a very long time. I’ve had the same experience more times than I can count (shuffling the Playlist gives you the same order for the first 10-20 songs). I’ve also noticed in my case that if I have a very long Playlist (like 300+ songs), I never hear anything but the same 70 or so. I have my theories but I can’t prove anything
They use some special shuffle algorithm that (they claim) weighs the songs based on how recently they were played, but you can change it in settings somewhere for true random
Yeah but even when you do that, the shuffle is still garbage. What i think is happening is that they’re loading the first X entries in the Playlist and passing that to the (bad) shuffle algorithm instead of passing the whole Playlist first. Then when it gets towards the end of X, it does the same thing with the next chunk. I can’t imagine that it saves that much money but it tracks with both what I see and the general trends of enshitification
Part of my theory is my very specific tastes have strong armed the algorithm. I have a playlist with every genre i listen to in it and I abuse the shuffle button until something comes on that fits my current vibe.
It does this for me with every song I’ve played from the playlist so far. If I’m on a long drive, listening to the same playlist for an hour, and I like a song, add it to the playlist, or play a different song and go back to the playlist, the whole thing starts over at the beginning again and I have an hour of songs to skip through.
Yes I’ve had similar experiences. Even with smart shuffle on those new songs are the same. Another annoying feature is whenever i add a song from smart shuffle to the playlist it queues it up right away forcing a repeat listen.
I like to set random on my Navidrome instance, but that also includes my ost albums, which I don’t want.
It’s not that I’m lazy to remove them, it’s just that I can’t. I like listening to those, just not in my random queue
Back in the day, Apple had to tweak the shuffle feature on iTunes because truly random wasn’t random enough for people. It seems incomprehensible to some that a random playlist would play the same song twice in a row. People should roll a die more often.
I’ve noticed that randomized Spotify has what I call “rivers” of songs, where once it randomly hits one song along the river, it will always play the next one in the river until it hits the end. It’s really annoying.
It was doing a random selection when people expected a randomly ordered sequence.
This is it. What people think random is vs what it really is are often different.
The same song in a row three times is random etc. Randomness includes clumping. But most people think clumping isn’t random. We think shuffled is random.
The button isn’t even called random anymore. It’s called shuffle.
The book Fooled by Randomness is the best book on the phenomenon I’ve read. Taleb kills it in this book and it might be worth your time if this is interesting to you.
Vlc, atleast on android does randomly ordered sequence for music. The list is generated when you shuffle and it also shows how many tracks are remaining and total time for thoose tracks. No track repeats till a full sequence is over and i belive that is the best way of shuffling songs. But still you shoukd be removing thoose specific songs from your pkaylist by yourself
It was only playing the same song twice if people have the same song twice in their library or playlist. The only other possibility with either shuffle software is if you have it on shuffle repeat all, and it just so happens that the last song in the first shuffling is also the first song in the next. This can still happen today, but it is increasingly rare the larger your playlist is.
The issue back then was how it would randomly play the same artist twice in a row, or manage to play songs from an alum sequentially. Truly random shuffling.
Steve Jobs coined the term “less random” because the then-new shuffle would intentionally avoid playing the same artist or songs from the same album twice in a row.
I think the spotify shuffle+ algorithm weighs songs more when you’ve liked them more recently.
I’m also fairly confident the artist’s contract impacts the weight as well, especially for suggested songs not in your playlist.
Songs from the backlog get played, but at a much lower frequency. Random should have a relatively flat distribution, not a skewed bell curve.
I feel personally attacked :-(
True random doesn’t feel like random to people, like the other commenter said.
But there is selection bias involved as well. You don’t register the amount of time it plays the ‘correct’ music, but the wedding tracks really stand out.
Its not random and they are honest about that. Because true randomness leads to occurrences were people think it can’t be random. Funny video about it :
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OdLyKETk5o0&pp=ygUcc3BvdGlmeSBzaHVmZmxlIGlzbid0IHJhbmRvbQ%3D%3D
Couldn’t they just make it completely random without repeats until all songs are played or something?
Then it’s per definition not completely random.
It is. It’s just a different kind of random
Choose a random song from the kist each time VS Make a truly random ordering of the given playlist
It’s a different kind of random, one which is very much not completely random.
It’s better for it to not be completely random though.
The ordering is completely random tho? I mean, now this is just semantics. The ordering of the songs are not made to space out nearby songs or anything. In that sense it is completely randomone of all permutations(50P50) of songs.
