Reminds me of the old iTunes shuffle thing. When it was first introduced it was actually random but too many people complained it was broken when they heard the same artist multiple times in a row so they rewrote it as a shuffle algorithm that would feel more random than actual random.
Just goes to show, we don’t actually want random, we want variety.
There are two basic ways of doing “random” songs:
- Pick a new song randomly each time a song ends. This is the naive way to do it and can result in playing the same song twice.
- Randomly shuffle the list of songs once and then go through the shuffled list in order, guaranteeing that no single song gets played a second time before all songs have been played.
The strategies are different, but I’d argue that they’re equally “random.”
I’ve got a cheap Chinese aftermarket head unit in my car that uses strategy #1, and it’s mildly infuriating.
Yeah, but all modern music platforms use a more advanced random, where it will avoid putting two different songs by the same artist in a row for example. But it’s still based on the second strategy you wrote.
This seems somewhat flawed. Lets say you have 90 songs by Vengaboys, and 10 songs by Slayer in your playlist. In order to play every song without playing Vengaboys back to back, you’d need to play Slayer 4x more often than you play Vengaboys.
Those were the best days of Apple. Steve Jobs literally titled the feature “Less Random”.
Well, yea.
And since they removed my playlist radio, song discoverability has gone down so much. They just keep playing me the same damn music when I want related stuff.
For the same reason all the streaming sites decided to gimp their discoverability and just force you into whatever the algorithm thinks you need.
Some middle manager wanted to justify their bonus so they jumped in the current fad
Wait until he finds out DJ X just plays the playlists from Spotify curators and he isn’t really keeping track of what you skipped.
I don’t know where you heard that but it’s not correct.
https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/
I didn’t hear it anywhere, its personal experience. Spotify straight up isn’t shuffling any of my older liked music. Everytime I hit shuffle it always ends up localized around recently saved music and it never changes. Moreover, that’s a blogpost from a decade ago. Spotify changes stuff constantly. I seriously doubt that is the same algorithm they’re using now. ESPECIALLY considering they’ve introduced ‘Smart Shuffle’ which doesn’t only shuffle music you have saved but adds completely new music into the mix as well. That and Spotifys overall quality control has dropped drastically in the past decade.
While I can agree with others that it might not be that strict and they may get more variety, from personal experience, my 700+ song playlist tends to focus on a handful of songs. Blue - Eiffel 65 gets a CRAZY amount of playtime for some reason. It’s a running joke with my carpool that it’s my car’s theme song. I can sometimes skip it 2-3 times on my drive to work. And some songs seem to never come up. I’ve been having some better luck with the AI DJ lately, although it will throw in an entire chunk of songs I don’t even care about as basically ads.
That song is probably cheap for them to play
I’ve got thousands of liked songs and I get a nice variety of old and recent stuff. From last month to as old as 8 years ago.
Yeah I’ve got like 8000 and there have been times when it feels like it’s focusing on newly added stuff, but older stuff definitely does pop up and I feel like it’s a pretty good mix. 90% of the time I’ve just got my whole library on shuffle unless I’m actively looking for new stuff to add.
Interesting read
Yeah okay, so they use the Fisher Yates algorithm. Then how the fuck in my playlist of 1000 songs am I CONSTANTLY getting hit with multiple songs by the same artist? Once in a while, okay, that’s statistically likely, but not all the time, and not every time.
how many songs by the same artist do you have in that playlist? Your comments here don’t make sense. Repeating the same artist doesn’t make something not random and definitely doesn’t make it “the most 100 recently saved songs”. In fact repeating the same artist makes it quite likely that it is random as randomness is frequently misinterpreted as non-random if you would have read the article I linked you would understand that.
But you can make it actually random by doing this:
- Tap your profile picture
- Tap settings
- Tap Playback
- Toggle the “Automix” switch to off
Now you have truly random shuffle
I’m pretty sure this is wrong. From what I understand, automix just blends together the ending and beginning of the two songs. For example if there’s silence at the end of one song, or ‘compatible’ music, the ‘ai’ will try to smooth out the transition like a dj would while making a mix.
Edit: yup, that’s what it is https://support.spotify.com/ca-en/article/tracks-transitions/
Turn off* cross play.
That will give more randomness, but I still get a bunch of songs on repeat in a 3K song playlist. Annoying.Well it’s some setting. I recently made the switch and now I’m hearing random songs I haven’t heard in years. It’s actually sampling my whole collection as far as I can tell.
I followed this life hack article and it worked for me: https://lifehacker.com/the-reason-spotify-shuffles-aren-t-really-random-and-h-1849756947
I doubt it. True random shuffle play is rare, because humans don’t understand the chaos of true random generation, we see patterns in it and assume it’s not random.
A truly random shuffle can play the same song twice. A truly random shuffle can play multiple songs from the same artist in a row. In the fullness of time all of these will happen with a true random shuffle.
Nothing does that these days. Nearly everything “random” is algorithmically engineered to be less random so it feels more random to humans.
You can definitely make a truly random shuffle that doesn’t play the same song twice within a gap of ten songs.
You just make a list of all the song IDs that aren’t in the last ten played, and grab an item at a random index.
Randomness is a texture not a shape. Dice are random despite only being able to present six outcomes.
But then it is not truly random, that is the point.
The same song 10 times in a row also has a chance of happening in a truly random list.
Random pick without replacement is no less random than random pick with replacement. You just have a continuously smaller pool to pick from.
It’s absolutely possible to have better randomness/shuffle without repeating songs so often.
there exist other random distributions than the uniform distribution
You’re thinking of a random sequence. We’re talking about shuffling according to a random seed.
A truly random shuffle can play the same song twice. A truly random shuffle can play multiple songs from the same artist in a row. In the fullness of time all of these will happen with a true random shuffle. Nothing does that these days.
Tidal does and it’s annoying af.
A truly random walk through a playlist might choose the same song twice in a row. A truly random shuffle would only have each entry appear once and you’d have to play past the end of the shuffle to hear a song repeat.
now I wish for a more nuanced configed shuffle because I totally love having a few songs from the same artist back to back but not the same one.
you my sir are godsend
Technically right. Computer can’t do actually random calculations, instead researchers have made pseudo random functions, which similarly behaves as a truly random function would.
That’s true. It also has nothing to do with the topic: only shuffling recent songs (allegedly). The title has more info than the meme image.
Spotify is still the worst in that regard. It even loves to constantly repeat the same ~5 songs or so, at least before I quit the damn thing. Winamp has done this better a couple decades ago already, among many other features.
Shuffle uses a limited list that rarely gets updated, but not just the 100 most recent ones. You can force it refresh by turning off shuffle and force closing the app.
The shuffle button does it’s thing every time you activate it. I believe, anecdotally, that it uses whatever song is playing or selected as a seed to build the random queue.
Try this, select a song and press Shuffle. When it gets to a song you don’t want to hear, skip to a song you want to hear and toggle Shuffle off and on.
Good to know, but it would be even better if it just shuffled the playlist you are listening to instead amaright?
It’s probably for the best
I specifically use shuffle on my favourite list when I get tired of the music rut I’m in and want to listen to the shit I listened to 5-10 years ago
there was that meme about adding everything to one playlist a few days back, that’s mel, lol, I don’t even know thr number of songs on the Playlist, it’s 112 hours long at the moment.
Hit the shuffle button twice to turn on Smart Shuffle. It will throw some brand new songs into the playlist shuffle.
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I’m on android. I just confirmed you can’t do it with an album but instead with playlists. Add a song to a playlist, hit shuffle, then hit shuffle again and a little star should appear in the shuffle icon.
Can confirm works on android, no clue about Apple tho.
It is shit like this that made me get back into buying my own music.
So then thumbs down all of those 100 songs until it plays you new songs
Yeah because that’s reasonable… give me a fuck break
How many times you gonna sit there thumbing down tracks when listening to random? What if you actually like the song?
This ain’t a solution
Spotify has a thumbs down button?
On the desktop spicetify solves this with the shuffle+ plugin. On mobile you can browse to a file in a playlist and start from there instead of shuffling the playlist. Turning off Automix also helps.
Nah, it’s payola.
I’ve been listening to music from the 60s almost exclusively on spotify this year. The algorithm is hell bent on me listening to the band “The Smoke”. I really don’t think a one hit wonder band that broke up in 1976 would be paying to have their music pushed so hard like that.
