How to shuffle songs? - Spotify Engineering
How to shuffle songs? - Spotify Engineering
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)
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 know this for sure, but I think it's something along the lines of certain record companies can pay to have their artists played more often than others so when you start a playlist on shuffle it's biased toward those higher "tier" songs. I think caches also plays into it to a degree, but it's definitely not just an issue with a lack of randomness. I think they do the same thing with the "AI DJ" which will play completely irrelevant songs to your tastes in a small group and then go back to normal at intervals. "Hey this is your DJ X, you just heard Kat Stevens so now I'm gonna play Kendrick Lamar (which you've never once played willingly) and I'll be following that with a few other things that are currently being promoted"
In my case, I had local music synced up in a playlist, and the playlist still did shuffle though my music. (which Spotify didn't know the artist of given that it wasn't part of their library.) The broken shuffle was just one of many reasons why I stopped using streaming and went with local music players back in the day.
