6mo ago

How to shuffle songs? - Spotify Engineering

engineering.atspotify.com

This (old) post details how to interfere with randomness to make it feel more random to the end user.

This reminded me of how many games “cheat” in a similar way to make critical hits seem more fair (increase the probability when it has not triggered for too long and decrease it when it just triggered)

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2y ago

How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

engineering.atspotify.com /2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/

11 comments

Spotify's shuffle technique: play the same 5 or 6 songs in a row on a given playlist every time you play it on shuffle despite the literal hundreds of ither songs to pick from
- For me it looped though the same 30 songs out of more than 1000. I much prefer a one time shuffle that guarantee all songs in my playlist, just in a new order. It's not exactly rocket science, if it's in the playlist it naturally should be played. That and horrible sync with local music made me just go all "offline" with PowerAmp on mobile and Foobar2000 on pc...
- I'm pretty sure a lot of that is based on what is cached locally. I remember reading something about it.
  Finding & clearing the local cache should fix it.
  Saves them a ton of bandwidth I guess.
  
  saving bandwidth at cost of poor experience. is this different for paid users ?
  
  It doesn't make much practical sense when the entire playlist if downloaded and they still do this. Just ruins the listening experience.
I don't understand the purpose of Spotify posting a complete work of fiction like this. There's nothing random about their Shuffle setting, nothing at all. There's a reason third-party sites that serve no other purpose than to shuffle Spotify playlists exist.
- Well, no one‘s saying Spotifys implementation is any good. But the theory that true randomness doesn’t always feel random still stands true. Most music player/streaming apps implement this in some way. Some better, some worse.
Yes, and it suck.
I use spotify a lot, and their fake random sucks.
The distribution favorise some musics (maybe they earn more on thoses ?).
The distribution make that some music are never played, while some are played very frequently.
There is no check that the same music isn't ran twice in a row (I know it can happen with true random).
A pure random would have an equal distribution on all music over time.
Thanks to last.fm I can track how many time I play tracks.
And I use random shuffle almost all the time.
I got a track that got played 4 times in 2024, and another 21 times, I never started the tracks by myself, it's the random shuffle.
- Third party solutions can at least partially fix this. I have this site: https://spotifyshuffler.com/ create a shuffled copy of my playlists occasionally. Then you just play the pre-shuffled playlist with shuffle disabled.
  In my case I have a large (several thousand track) playlist, and I turn on Spotify's shuffle just to pick the first track at a somewhat random spot in the large list and then shut their shuffle off toward continue the pre-shuffled list without their manipulation. Whenever I add content to the playlist I have it reshuffled.

11 comments