With Apple Music, in contrast, there is a Play Next option to play a song next and a Play Later option that adds it to the end of the queue. With Spotify, you can add songs only to the end of your. I have a 290 song playlist that I just recently totally randomized because I was having the same problem of songs repeating too often. Then today in a span of about 25 songs, I heard the same song play twice. A song should not repeat until every song in the playlist has played at least once. Shuffle play is still repeating songs too often.
At Spotify we take user feedback seriously. We noticed some users complaining about our shuffling algorithm playing a few songs from the same artist right after each other. The users were asking “Why isn’t your shuffling random?”. We responded “Hey! Our shuffling is random!”
So who was right? As it turns out, both we and the users were right but it’s a bit more complicated than that. It also tells a nice story about how to interpret users’ feedback.
Our perspective
Since the Spotify service launched, we used Fisher-Yates shuffle to generate a perfectly random shuffling of a playlist. However, perfectly random means that the following two orders are equally likely to occur (different colors represent different artists):A side note: I think Fisher-Yates shuffle is one of the most beautiful random algorithms and it’s amazing that such complicated problem can be solved in 3 lines of code in some programming languages. And this is accomplished using the optimal number of operations and optimal amount of randomness.
Gambler’s fallacy
At first we didn’t understand what the users were trying to tell us by saying that the shuffling is not random, but then we read the comments more carefully and noticed that some people don’t want the same artist playing two or three times within a short time period.
It is known that we humans are sometimes bad at estimating probabilities. What is the mplayerx app on mac. Suppose that you use a coin every day at work to decide where to eat lunch. The first four days of the week the coin decided that you should eat Thai food, but you prefer Indian. You might think “The coin decided four times this week in favor of Thai, it must be Indian today”.
In June, it interactive ads that don’t require listeners to remember promo codes. While, in that case, the feature solved a legitimate problem for listeners and hosts, the polls seem more like a test of whether people will want to interact with an app as they listen. If they do, that could mean endless possibilities for Spotify to give hosts space to interface with their listeners and get more feedback without having to ask them to send an email or tweet at them. Spotify game of thrones app.
If you think the coin has higher probability of deciding for Indian on Friday, you are wrong. Throwing the coin for a millionth time is the same as throwing it for the first time. After all, it is just a simple coin, it has no memory, doesn’t know who threw it, etc. So both heads and tails have the same probability on Friday – 50%.
Another example: people often think that if they haven’t won anything in a scratchcard lottery a couple of times in a row, they should have bigger chance of winning now. This phenomenon is called Gambler’s fallacy and it’s the same fallacy that lead to the mistake about Thai/Indian food.
Let’s go back to our users who have also fallen victims to Gambler’s fallacy. If you just heard a song from a particular artist, that doesn’t mean that the next song will be more likely from a different artist in a perfectly random order. However, the old saying says that the user is always right, so we decided to look into ways of changing our shuffling algorithm so that the users are happier. We learned that they don’t like perfect randomness.
The algorithm
It seemed like a problem that must have been solved by somebody else before. Indeed, we found a blog post The art of shuffling music by Martin Fiedler that solves precisely the same problem. https://lvzrbg.weebly.com/how-to-trouble-shoot-an-app-on-mac.html. However, his algorithm is complicated and could be very slow in some cases, so we modified it to better suit our needs.
So, in that case, you can download and access your music library and play from there when you are offline — this facility only is given in this apk. Mighty offline spotify apk.
The main idea is very similar to the methods used in dithering. Suppose we have a black and white picture that uses a few hundred shades of gray.
We would like to simplify the picture even further by using only pixels of two colors, black and white. We could use random sampling: say a pixel has an 80% shade of gray, then it will have 80% chance of becoming black and 20% chance of becoming white. We process pixels one by one and for each one we randomly decide its new color based on the original shade of gray. However, the result is very far from satisfactory.
As you can see, the black pixels form clusters and there are also big white spots. It would be better if the black and white spots were spread out more evenly. Other algorithms like Floyd–Steinberg dithering avoid clusters and produce much better results. Spotify app does not open windows 10.
The clusters seen on the previous picture almost fully disappeared. We can take inspiration from the dithering algorithms to solve our problem with clusters of songs by the same artist; we will try to spread them throughout the whole playlist. Suppose we have a playlist containing some songs by The White Stripes, The xx, Bonobo, Britney Spears (Toxic!) and Jaga Jazzist. For each artist we take their songs and try to stretch them as evenly as possible along the whole playlist. Then we collect all songs and order them by their position. A picture is better than a thousand words.
As you can see, songs from an artist are nicely spread out and it looks pretty random to a human eye. Let’s look in more detail how the algorithm works.
- Let’s say we have 4 songs from The White Stripes as in the picture above. This means that they should appear roughly every 25% of the length of the playlist. We spread out the 4 songs along a line, but their distance will vary randomly from about 20% to 30% to make the final order look more random. You should be able to see that the distance between the red circles on the line is not the same.
- We introduce a random offset in the beginning; otherwise all first songs would end up at position 0. You can see that both Britney Spears and Jaga Jazzist only have one song, but the random offset causes them to appear at a random place in the playlist.
- We also shuffle the songs by the same artist among each other. Here we can use Fisher-Yates shuffle or apply the same algorithm recursively, for example we could prevent songs from the same album playing too close to each other.
All in all the algorithm is very simple and it can be implemented in just a couple of lines. It’s also very fast and produces decent results.
Conclusion
Spotify year in review app. The algorithm is now rolled out to everyone using our desktop client and other clients will follow soon. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on our Community page.
Further reading
- What does randomness look like?, a blog post by Aatish Bhatia
- Clustering illusion on Wikipedia
- A very lucky wind, a radio episode about a couple of interesting random phenomenons
- Dither on Wikipedia
- How Randomness Rules Our World and Why We Cannot See It by Michael Shermer
Tags: randomness, shuffle algorithms, user feedback
![Shuffle Shuffle](/uploads/1/3/3/9/133905634/287094773.jpg)
Spotify Shuffle Plays Same Songs
Spotify Only Shuffle Play
It’s bigger. It’s bolder. It’s better than ever. No, we’re not talking about some artist’s new sound, but about the refreshed look that iOS users will enjoy on Spotify mobile starting today. Both Free and Premium subscribers will benefit from a more streamlined, easy-to-use interface with fresh designs to actionable icons that will make playing your favorite song or playlist as simple as the tap of a button.
Get to know the new designs for the elements you use every day that will be rolling out through the update.
Simpler and more universal Shuffle Play button
Our new green “shuffle play” icon reduces streaming to the click of one familiar button, which includes the shuffle icon.
Easy to use Action Rows
All actions, including ‘like,’ ‘play,’ and ‘download’ for Premium users are grouped in a row at the central part of the screen. Plus, downloading for listening without Wi-Fi (for our Premium users) now has a new icon—the same one we’ve been using for podcasts. Plus, the new row is your one-stop-shop for everything you’ll ever want to do one-handed—the experience is much more adaptive and responds to the size of your device.
New Track rows with cover art
Spotify Free Shuffle Plays Same Songs Download
We’re now showing a track’s cover art in all views except “Album” view. This will make it easier than ever to navigate the app and find familiar songs. Plus, we’ll highlight songs you’ve already “liked” by showing the heart icon next to the track name.
Starting February 27, iOS users of Spotify mobile can access and navigate music like never before. Now that you know what to look for, it’s time to get streaming.