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How to shuffle songs? - Spotify Engineering (engineering.atspotify.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

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.