Spotify - anyone heard of it?

You can still shuffle within folders, but only from the desktop app. If you want to shuffle a folder on your phone you need to kick it off from the desktop app and then connect to your phone.

xp without paying ten pounds or any bills for anyone that makes something you love

Okay, I understand that many people don't get how seemingly non-random a truly random playlist can be, but right now it's very, very obvious that the shuffle function has adopted some element of adaptation, or "guided listening", or whatever. When I the first track I listen to on a 10,000 track playlist happens to be Matching Mole (or whatever) and 10 of the next 20 songs are also Matching Mole, it's obvious that shuffle is no longer random, or even close to it. I really like the idea of having an auto-generating "mood" playlist that uses a track that I choose as a seed, but more importantly I really, really value a genuinely RANDOM shuffle in order to explore the less-traveled corners of my library! How can we get a genuinely random shuffle again?

Looking into this a bit more, I think my first instinct to give Spotify the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was creating a "mood" playlist based on a "seed" track was too generous. Instead, shuffle seems to only function within a small number of tracks (can't be more than 50 or so) that surround a given track in the current sort order of the playlist.

So even if your playlist is 10,000 songs, it'll only "shuffle" within the 50 (or so) songs that surround (or maybe follow) the track that you started playing on the playlist. That is... very bad.

(this might be applicable only to when using Spotify Connect to play music on another device, but that doesn't make it any less of a problem, imo)

Having become familiar with Apple-style "take away the most useful features and claim no-one was using them anyway", I'm convinced that Spotify's next move is going to be to remove the ability to copy-paste text into the app to create a playlist.

fuck me, sorry folks I've been day drinking, that one's apparently been gone for years

Dan, it shouldn't do this. A couple things to check. Are you playing a playlist th at has local files thtat haven't been downloaded to your phone? Did you take some time for playlists to completely load on both computer and phone?

Kind of embarrassed after going on for 5 consecutive whinge posts above, but the phenomenon is real and seems to be the same thing that most of the people in this thread are talking about: https://community.spotify.com/t5/forums/v3_1/forumtopicpage/board-id/spotifyiOS/thread-id/30007/page/34

I don't download files to my phone (only stream), and I'm not sure about the playlist completely loading thing (how could I check that?). I've noticed it most recently while using an iphone to control tracks being played on either a PC or a chromecast using Spotify Connect. If I sort by Title (track title) before hitting shuffle, it becomes VERY obvious:

- Shuffle is on

- Start playing a track near the beginning of an almost 10,000 track long playlist (where all the track names start with numbers, since I've got the playlist sorted by track name) :
- the track I hit play on happens to be LCD Soundsystem - 45:33 Padded Cell Remix.

- Here are the next several tracks--keep in mind that shuffle is definitely turned ON at this point:
- Desmond Dekker - 007 Shanty Town
- Ghostface Killah - 260
- Harold Budd - Abandoned Cities
- Boards of Canada - 84 Pontiac Dream
- Hercules - 7Ways
- ABC - 4 Ever 2 Gether
- Barre Phillips - A-i-a
- The Maytals - 54-46 That's my number
- Harry Nilsson - 1941
- Amerie - 1thing

You get the idea. It seems to be shuffling ONLY among songs that are in the near proximity on the playlist to the first song that was played (in this case, those that start with numbers, or sometimes the letter 'A').

By completely loaded I mean, if you open the playlist and scroll to the bottom are all the tracks showing up or are ones toward the bottom coming up blank?

Also, does this happen when you hit the Shuffle Play button at the top of the playlist or only when you start with a specific song?

Thanks, here's what I've done:
- Open playlist, scroll aaaall the way to the bottom (this takes a while) to confirm that tracks all the way down to "Z" have indeed loaded.
- Hit the "Shuffle Play" button

- First track that plays is Nirvana - About a Girl. Next tracks are:
- Terry Riley - Across the lake of the ancient word
- T. Rex - 20th Century Boy
- Saint Etienne - Action
- Steve Reich - Act 1 - The casting out of ishmael and hagar
- Turzi - Acid Taste
- Steve Reich - Act 1 - Who is Abraham?
- Tracy Thorn - A-Z
- The Rolling Stones - 2000 Man
- Mission of Burma - Academy Fight Song
- Scuba - Action
- Steve Reich - Act 3 - Who is sarah?
- Souls of Mischief - 93 'til infinity
- Paul Hardcastle - 19

It's still stuck near the beginning of the playlist, where all the song titles begin with "A" or with numbers, and it's not even doing a great job of shuffling within that region (note 3 of the first 13 tracks are from the same Steve Reich album).

Very weird, I'm stumped

Turning off Spotify Connect fixes it, so I guess it's a Spotify Connect issue.

also I def. realize this isn't spotify support, but, uh, I don't have a lot of faith in my ability to affect change through official channels so I guess this was just about bitching to a familiar crowd

^^ solitary posts that sum up ILX

I’ve always found the playlist shuffle function bizarre, to the point where last week I created a playlist with two albums and listened to it on shuffle and it played every single track from the 2nd album out of sequence before playing a single track from the first album. How is that even possible?

If each album was ten tracks then there's just under a 1/1000 chance of that happening. Not too ludicrous.

show your working

(isn't it 10/20 * 9/19 * 8/18 * ... * 1/11 or 1 in 184k)

I mean, I could post the next 100 tracks that all follow the same pattern. Like I said, I definitely understand how randomness can appear non-random. This isn't that.

No this is definitely a built in function. Just now I added an album to an existing playlist with about 10 albums on it, then hit shuffle. It played every song from the newly added album before moving on to the older tracks.

(isn't it 10/20 * 9/19 * 8/18 * ... * 1/11 or 1 in 184k)

That was my working which somehow achieved a different result.

Which did seem suspiciously low.

High.

Delete me.

I could never get Spotify shuffle function to work

what you can do though, silly as it may seem, is to copypaste the playlist into something like this http://textmechanic.com/text-tools/basic-text-tools/sort-text-lines/ and randomize the order of tracks

and then paste to a new, randomized playlist

So going public huh

Hendrix gone from his top spot, replaced by The Breeders

Holy shit Moby at 1 followed by Jamiroquai at 2.

My wife is VERY unhappy that they’ve deleted the running feature....

Actually, mad as hell is a way better description. They’re gonna be losing a lot of subscribers over this..

Looks like they did remove search by year for some reason. Vote to put it back here.

search by year works fine for me. "year:2017 label:cascine" returns albums released in 2017 on Cascine. I wish they would just add this as something that you can select in the UI, but it works. one of the many things I miss from RDIO is being able to go to organized label pages and then sort those results by year.

the year:XXXX search stopped working on my phone, but I haven't updated the Spotify app on there in a long time. It works on my desktop.

Doesn't work in the desktop version for me.

how many times do I have to read this same piece, as if spotify begins and ends with its popular playlists https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/our-access-to-music-is-unprecedented-why-does-it-stress-us-out-so-much/2018/03/07/a00686e6-174a-11e8-b681-2d4d462a1921_story.html?utm_term=.150c7d23fcb0

I think a lot of people are confused about the functionality spotify actually provides. My complaints about it are well documented in this thread, there are many features I liked that were removed or downgraded. Yet despite all that spotify remains the most powerful and flexible streaming/offline music player and music library. As far as I know, none of the other music services really comes close to what I'm getting out of spotify. I know lots of people aren't power users in the same way or maybe just use playlists, but if suspect those are also not people who are looking to dig deep for new or unusual music.

yeah, after playing around with the year search, it doesn't seem to work right. for example, "artist:rihanna year:2008" gets me all kinds of noise that should be filtered out by the year.

music metadata basically doesn't work

it looks like they killed the entire metadata API in 2016. I was bouncing around the support forums and it seems like they will close any feature request that doesn't get at least 50 upvotes. the problem with this kind of thing is even though I'd really like some of this stuff to be implemented, I recognize that I'm a bit of a fringe case and that most of the users really don't care about browsing by label, sorting by release date, or metadata search.

metadata is important for recommendations and sensible automated aggregation though, i imagine the crazypants nature of it drives glenn a bit nuts

yeah, I mean I'm positive that the metadata is present and there may even be be an existing external API that replaces the old metadata API. but I can also see why it's not a priority to expose that to endusers (even though it annoys the hell out of me).

They removed some late period Blue Oyster Cult albums, thereby removing crucial deep cuts from my career spanning BOC playlist

yet...the Congress and the President remain silent.

WHAT

tell me I can still listen to Fire Of Unknown Origin!

oh no you're safe, i mean like LATE like Heaven Forbid and Curse of the Hidden Mirror and like the Bad Channels soundtrack...I think Club Ninja might be gone too?

FWIW, we don't remove stuff, the labels do. And one common reason is changes in licensing, in which case the missing stuff usually comes back again before long...

Year search is probably my single most-used feature of Spotify. Is it really gone?

haha ums that BOC list sounds interesting

It's called the Playlist of 1000 Psychic Wars

It's still pretty good even without "Pocket"

Glen I figured that was it