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Impressive, but I'd be more impressed if they fixed their random shuffle.
by downerending 7y ago
Impressive, but I'd be more impressed if they fixed their random shuffle.
- nvarsj 7y agoWhat's wrong with the spotify shuffle? edit: Did a search, seems like there's quite a few problems (only playing recently added songs, only playing 100 songs out of the playlist, etc.). I know google music has also had long standing issues with shuffle play - and in fact I left it over these kind of issues. Is it really difficult to implement a shuffle?!
- fuzzmz 7y agoIt's not really random, in the sense that if you have a playlist and hit shuffle it'll always play in the same order instead of randomizing the play order each time you listen to that playlist. Basically, with the current behavior, once you learned the order of the shuffled songs you can always know what comes next.
- mrkeen 7y agoIt may be the case that 100 tracks are sent to the device and the shuffle logic chooses from them locally.
- kingosticks 7y agoNot sure why you are being down voted, this is essentially how Spotify's shuffle works. At least, if you MITM the official client and load a large playlist/context you'll only see a small window worth of tracks being loaded. And you won't see any request from the client when you then shuffle that playlist, it's done locally. This may, of course, have changed. My experiments while (badly) implementing librespot's shuffle functionality were a few years ago now.
- downerending 7y agoIn my case, all of the tracks are already on the device. But yes, it's possible that they're doing something like this anyway.
- The_Latecomer 7y agoGoogle stopped supporting Play Music a while back to be fair. Have you tried using YouTube music? Would you say you find this same issue there?
- anoonmoose 7y agoWhat do you mean, stopped supporting?
- reciprocornous 7y agohttps://www.digitaltrends.com/music/what-happens-to-google-play-music-youtube-music/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/music/what-happens-to-google-p...
- downerending 7y agoFor me, I listen only from "Songs" (my entire collection, which is about 3000 tracks). Even when shuffled, almost everything I hear is something I've heard within the last week or two. When I use the Amazon app under the same conditions, I often hear a track I haven't heard for a long time. Which is what I'd expect when random sampling from 200 hours of music. (I don't use playlists, as they're simply too much work.)
- Barrin92 7y agowhile we're asking for spotify features and in case someone at spotify sees this post: You've put a lot of money into podcasting, please add the 'new episodes' feature of the mobile app to the desktop/web app. Essential feature that's still missing.
- kossTKR 7y agoYeah it's pretty interesting that they undertake this huge task when one of the basic features still doesn't work. Simply put when you shuffle from all of you liked songs you will mostly get the same tracks over and over - some tracks will stay hidden forever, - pretty weird and annoying. It seems to stem from issues in relation to this post, ie. sql queries and caching to prevent too much CPU use on their end.
- 2bitencryption 7y agoI think the root cause is because spotify shuffle isn't true "shuffle" in the mathematical, random sense. They perform some analysis to increase the "perceived randomness" - e.g., if the true random seed picks the same artist twice in a row (totally possible), pick another song by a different artist, or else people will perceive the shuffle as not "random" enough. Unfortunately I don't have the source for this right now, but I'm sure someone will hop in and provide it if I'm wrong about this :)
- sorenjan 7y agohttps://labs.spotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/ https://labs.spotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/
- downerending 7y agoAmusingly, the comments at the bottom are from a large number of others also noting that their algorithm doesn't work as described.
- downerending 7y agoI'm familiar with the idea. Their custom algorithm seems to do the opposite. The order actually being generated has very little perceived randomness, far less than what a true random shuffle would look like.
- claudiulodro 7y agoThey have also further modified the shuffle algorithm within the last year or two to favor putting songs at the top that the user hasn't listened to a lot. There are definitely a variety of heuristics involved with their shuffling algorithm.
- sushisource 7y agoOr the "queue album/song" functionality. It's amazing how absolutely dogshit the Spotify UX is. I keep using it because they have the best selection / device compatability but god the UI is just awful.
- airstrike 7y agoI'm now convinced it's broken by design. The same songs keep showing up on any song / album radio that's even remotely related, I can't help but conclude, perhaps unsurprisingly, that it's all driven by payola.