Spotify - anyone heard of it?

wait, what's the shuffle truth? i want to believe

It refuses to include certain songs and even entire albums in the shuffle. It also plays certain songs way more than it should. For some reason, it takes a weeks for new tracks in my list to enter the shuffle rotation. I just want a real shuffle.

as much as I like Spotify, I have to say I am also a shuffle truther

Personally, i've had those sorts of problems with basically every computer-based music player when in shuffle mode. Whole albums ignored for days and yet, such and such song gets played 12 times in same time frame. And thats winamp, wmp, vlc, shit i can't remember all their names, but every last one was flawed, in that mode. These days i just go alphabetical. Usually works well.

And i do that on my Android phone as well.

The truther part really ramps up when I hit shuffle, then pull up the queue and carefully inspect it, then play the last song in the queue, so that it refreshes, then inspect it again, over and over, looking for clues.

haha

are some people are upset because shuffle isn't playing the stuff they want to hear? that's now how shuffle works

I mean sure it's sometimes going to play three songs from the same album relatively close together or will play some songs and albums more than others, this happens because it's random.

https://saintlad.com/spotify-shuffle-play-is-not-random/

Spotify responds:

https://labs.spotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/

Yeah, that's pretty old, doesn't really address the problem I'm seeing.

I get that actual random shuffling will sometimes give you three on a row from the same album or whatever.

The issue I have is that I can shuffle and reshuffle all I want, but it refuses to play tracks from specific albums. This happens with new albums that I add to my list. It always takes a few weeks at a minimum before it starts showing tracks from certain new albums in the shuffle queue.

Ok, I work at Spotify but I don't work on Shuffle, but I still have to ask: if you want to hear some stuff from specific albums, why don't you just play those? Or make a shorter "recent discoveries" playlist instead of hoping any semi-randomizer happens to hit the 1% or .1% you want it to from your big list?

so this is my shorter recent discoveries list, and it's closer to about 10% of tracks that just never come up. I do indeed end up listening to those individual records on their own outside of the shuffle, but my preference is to mix it up and just let it play. I suspect if I dig far enough down into the queue these tracks will eventually show up, but it's strange that they get pushed to the bottom.

if you want to hear some stuff from specific albums, why don't you just play those

lazyness certainly plays a big part in my use of shuffle

sometimes when I don't know what I want to hear I go to Songs (I've saved tons of albums to my "virtual record collection") and press shuffle, result is usually very enjoyable, inspiring

I also have a few playlists, for instance my favorite tracks from 2018 list, that I frequently update and where I can't really remember the content, so I often listen to it on shuffle

but somehow, after hours and hours of shuffling these playlists, I have a distinct feeling that (a few) certain songs come up again and again while other songs never come up, and so the shuffle thing doesn't work that well for keeping me acquainted with what's on my lists

I can't really be bothered to put in hours to verify if I'm crazy or if there's a glitch in the programming, but my impression certainly is that the shuffle function isn't perfect, and sometimes I'll shuffle the sequencing manually (similar effect to sorting alphabetically, but you can do it over and over) to improve the shuffle experience

https://uploadir.com/u/u46ogbxx.gif

idgi

he’s sequencing his shuffle (American sports slang™)

I wonder if pseudo randomization works best for smaller sized lists, and that the weird effects of true randomization are less noticeable with larger lists.

Is there a way to sync the mobile app with the desktop app, in terms of recent searches, last album played, etc.? The two apps seem to keep those details entirely separate (even though I'm signed in to my acct. on both); so it's not "seamless" to switch from one to other (i.e., from desk to car).

lol, the banner photo for Roger Eno is a picture of Brian Eno

I will try to figure out who controls that, and tell them...

that would be his own record company, right?

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/05/10-years-of-spotify-should-we-celebrate-or-despair?CMP=share_btn_fb

Amusing to read that the 'pro' argument includes such pearls as "its 320kbps “high quality” setting will satisfy all but the most sensitive listener... " which reads like Spotify wrote it themselves.

A con they missed is the shitty editorialising of Spotify-created playlists e.g. "great tunes old and new, for fans of real music" is the description of an 80 track playlist called Transistor dominated by 90s/00s white dudes with guitars while the 'Sweet Soul Sunday' playlist promoted next to it manages to say the first bit without the patronising pandering of the last bit.

Anyone know how to get a "more like this" but only with new stuff? Would be great for trying to find new dance music releases...

^^second this request

something that might help you is this "trick" I mentioned a bit upthread:

you can use google to search for playlists containing specific songs, for example:
site:spotify.com inurl:playlist "pour aisha"

does discover weekly rely purely on user playlists? that would explain why listening to autechre's nts sessions for about 8 hours each week for a month has had zero effect on mine - searching for a track using that google trick finds a massive 8 playlists, 2 of which are generic new release playlists and the rest are just the nts sessions themselves.

Does anyone know why the queueing tracks vanish when you shut your iPhone down? Even just closing the app itself makes it disappear too i think. Any trick ways of getting the queue to 'stay' so that when you close Spotify it's still there later?

This has been happening with increasing regularity on my iPhone as well, over the past couple of months. It doesn’t happen every time you close the app (or when the app closes itself, which happens a lot too), but more often than not it does. Extremely annoying, and something that was never a problem before.

Yeah it's definitely a new thing innit? I thought it was just me!

Huh, I did not realize I had "Keep on listening to similar tracks when your music ends" until just now, when my La Monte Young playlist auto-segued itself to Cutting Crew.

wait, there are La Monte Young records on Spotify?

heh, even when they change their Spotify handle there's no escape from the imposters:

https://open.spotify.com/track/5gJB7T4UtlnJ4YSuu3E34c?si=by0JiJekTmGbPWLJDgLZSg

2 songs in this week's DW that I absolutely certainly have streamed on numerous occasions on this very account:
Mulatu Astatke - Tezeta
Ramsey Lewis - Rocky Raccoon

What might be the explanation?

Not able to access the web browser version at work this morning because Spotify is "making a few little improvements." No access, no explanations, and no estimated time to return. This a good reminder of why I don't rely solely on streaming services.

xp It's fairly common for me to see tracks in DW I have streamed before ... I have 4-5 today, I think

the web client is loading normally for me this morning

It's weird how certain songs keep coming back to my discover weekly. I think this is the fourth time I got Films by Gary Numan.

but... that's not supposed to happen?!

https://onegiantread.literatureworks.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2016/04/i-robot-feature-450x296.jpg

anyone finding the shuffle button is behaving strangely? if I've added new songs to a playlist I'm finding the shuffle concentrates almost wholly on those songs.

https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/9/79/398467957-HALquotes_006-e1363869879703.jpg

xp

That's the opposite of what happens to me. Shuffle never wants to play the stuff that was added recently.

Seems like Discover Weekly has had some sort of reset or algorithmic shift - getting lots of tracks I've played a lot already and more familiar artists than usual.

Also seems like the mini artwork avatar display has gone but I liked using this to go the track in playlist situ (tho this was never an obvious way of doing that) - is there no way of doing that now?

Buggy playlists view now too - width keeps adjusting as I scroll within that frame.

The "character" of DW noticeably changed for me this week, I agree. For the better, though! I got some tracks that were a little more mainstream than usual, but which in being reminded of I realized I did like more than I had previously realized. Kind of an "oh yeah, I forgot about that good track!" week. Foremost among these rediscoveries was NRBQ's Magnet, which I've loved but just forgotten about for years.

(n.b. I had never, to my knowledge played or liked any of the tracks that appeared--I'd just listened to them in the past pre-spotify)

Two Wings songs, though. :(

minor gripe: the date given for albums is the date they were added to spotify and there's no way of seeing the original release date.

p sure Revolver wasn't added to spotify in 1966?

Imagine there's not much commercial impetus for accurate metadata around original release date. Some old albums do have it correctly on there, though – I've had fun with using dates in the search (still seems to work for the web player)

eg: https://open.spotify.com/search/results/year%3A1974%20genre%3Areggae

(xpost)