Songs keep repeating when I shuffle a playlist

FJimenez1 I think you need to go back and reread what this post is about. We aren't having the issue of 1 song repeating over and over back to back. We are having an issue where in a playlist of 1000 songs or even 200 songs,when shuffle all is selected after say 9 or 10 songs have played one of those songs we just heard will be replayed. With shuffle all you should never here the same song twice until all the songs have been played randomly. And if you have ever used this on an extended period of time you would have noticed the same problem. This isn't a problem with our devices nor with our settings. It is a fundamental flaw with the software, there's a glitch and the refuse to fix it let alone acknowledge it. So your "fix" will not work, as it stands nothing will work because none of us have the ability to reerite the software.

As Sparky87 mentioned, this is about Shuffle not remembering which songs have already played and which have yet to be played. The introductio of Apple Music has broken the Shuffle feature, so now instead of saying "Playing Song 1 of 45", for example, it just has the Shuffle icon set to on and merrily shuffles away, repeating songs and sometimes even repeating the order of those songs.

I've been Shuffling with ease since my first iPod 20GB, and this is not how it's supposed to work. I have an old iPod Touch on iOS6 and it Shuffles correctly, showing the total number of songs in the Shuffled selection and how far into that selection the listener is. Current Shuffle doesn't operate this way.

This reminds me of when check/uncheck stopped working correctly and instead of packing up my songs and leaving I just went to iTunes Match to better control over what went on my device. Apple slowly taking away features that power users enjoy to serve up their own vision of what today's music listener wants, which is apparently the same ten songs from a curated playlist over and over again.

I honestly thought my head was messing with me the first few times this problem happened to me. My playlists range from 350 songs to 50 songs each and often times I find myself questioning whether or not I've heard song recently because I love the feather of shuffling a playlist and not having songs repeat themselves as I listen. I thought I was the only one with this problem! I'm glad I'm not and I hope Apple fixes it soon. I listen to music for ~4hrs/day at work and the shuffle function is used a lot! (btw I'm on an iPhone 6 on ios 9.1).

In the meantime, has anyone downloaded a good alternative music player app, while apple gets its head out of its ios? I downloaded the free app LISTEN today and it seems to be ok. Nothing slick, but I'm now hearing songs on shuffle in my playlist that I have not heard in a long time. It does seem to drain the battery a little.

I never updated my iphone 6 until recently, which I obviously am regretting. I can't believe people have been having this problem for roughly 6 months now. If apple doesn't fix this problem, there is NO WAY my next phone will be an apple.

I'm curious to know any alternate iOS apps that you guys have found as well with a working shuffle.

Really I'm just looking for one that shuffles properly and tells you what track you are on (example: 34 of 420). This way I can verify its playing through every track before looping around. The same way iPods function. Any ideas?

At first glance, i thought it did too. However after getting in the car later this morning, I'm not so sure. Back to automatically playing the first song in the "A's" then the 2nd, 3rd, etc. Too bad, Apple dropped the ball... again 😟

Well today was my first day of having Good Luck with shuffling a playlist in what now seems like forever.

I did two things. First I upgraded to IOS 9.2 last night. Then I made a NEW playlist of roughly 400 songs. I successfully played 55 songs today (on and off all day) from that playlist without having a single repeat. It may have been because of the upgrade, it may have been because of the need to make a new playlist after all this apple bs, or it may have been due to both. Not sure, but it sure was nice not to hear a repeat. I'll be adding more songs to this playlist, which I believe means it will be re-shuffling, but I'll report back if this issue rears its ugly head.

Well, an update fix won't help me since my iPod Touch is stuck at 6.1.6 or something like that. I'm not a software coder, but I do know random number generators have been out a long, long time and I would assume something like that would be at the heart of any kind of randomizing (shuffling) behavior. I actually did what you suggested - took my Christmas playlist and made two new ones (instrumental & vocal). I played the vocal one today and got the same sort of behavior. It started playing from 3 separate albums (multiples from each) and every now and then some random song outside of those three. But that playlist had about 10 albums in it. I guess I just have to concede that the code for shuffle in iOS is crap - as well as the version of iTunes (12.2) that I have. Last night I was using those new playlists on my computer (where I am now, again listening). The blue shuffle arrows are on, and it is literally playing the songs in sequence. I've tried skipping songs, turning it on and off (in the window and in the playlist header) to no avail. It's like the code for shuffling doesn't even exist. Seems this should be something very, very basic. so sad.😢

A quick point on some earlier posts - the hardware you're using is irrelevant. The issue is with the algorithm used in the app/OS to 'randomise' tracks.

I've been testing a bit since 9.2 came out. There seems to be slightly more variation of songs being picked, but it still seems to be favouring a certain number of albums/artists/tracks as it was before. A slight improvement, but still not great and a number of other bugs still present.

- Removing a track from My Music doesn't continue with the shuffled tracks, but takes you back to the beginning of the list and plays everything all over again.

- A couple of times today I've had a track playing and midway through it just starts playing the next track over the top.

- Still issues with matched tracks i.e. wrongly matched, changed /incorrect artwork etc.

6 months in and there are still fundamental issues with the app and the way in which key features are coded/written. A massive shame. Something that could have been so good is just SO bad.

Steve is dead on. I continued playing the same playlist today, and heard some songs that I heard yesterday. I've also witnessed a song abruptly ending in the middle of it and a new song start. It is a lot better, but still a rotten shame that apple won't completely fix the problem. Still does not show playing song x of x while playing a playlist.

Also, unrelated, but it seems I have to always sync twice lately to get the album covers to come over to the iphone. Usually if I sync only once, I have no album covers. The second sync will show all the album covers transferring. This software is going backwards.

Hi All

I've been aggravated with this too. So I decided today to call Apple Care and I spoke to a nice guy named Ryan who informed me that Apple is currently working on the issue. He said 9.3 is currently in beta mode but it should fix all of our shuffle problems. I told him I hope so and to tell his superiors to read thru this thread. This has been an on going issue since the Apple Music launch. In the future it would be nice to make sure that when updates happen it doesn't disrupt the flow of things that are working as they should. I've been checking this discussion for a fix since my last few comments and I must admit Bob Maquire holds some truth as to what's been going on.

A friend of mine described Bob's theory (check Nov. 20th comments). So maybe a few of you should make a call as well. The more calls about this issue the more we may be heard. Someone mentioned making a call before in a previous thread. Hope this 9.3 brings us "shuffle peace of mind". Hope this little news I shared helps my fellow shufflers feel a little better🙂

I have seen these issues:

- Removing a track from My Music doesn't continue with the shuffled tracks, but takes you back to the beginning of the list and plays everything all over again.

- A couple of times today I've had a track playing and midway through it just starts playing the next track over the top.

Long ago when the itunes app removed the live update feature I started using smart playlists to remove recently played tracks based on rating (i still have that old ipod somewhere, i should dig it up) needless to say over 10+ years my smart playlist nesting is quite extensive.

So, I have a playlist (usually 30-40 songs) that include unplayed new, least played 1-5star, and a few other randoms. Most of the time if I continuously listen to the playlist it will go start to finish no problem. if I stop listening, use other apps, (1) the time counter returns to 0:00 more often than not, (2) tracks I just listened to show up in Up Next. Swipe removing them causes another repeated track, eventually it will stop adding tracks to up next, which makes me think it is definitely some kind of association problem in the design of the app. So once the playlist ends, there ends up being a select few that never played, probably since removing the repeats was actually removal of those unplayed tracks. One other observation with this... in my car it shows the track number of the song in the playlist... on repeats it shows the original track number. 1..2..3..4..5..2..6..7..8..3..etc skipping repeat then continues to next.

The midway issue I have seen also. Sometimes it starts halfway into a song or skips in the song or stops too soon. I found a phone reboot fixes that everytime. But it is really annoying.

EDIT: is misread the midway issue, i have not had 2 songs playing at once.

This is another issue I've been dealing with. If you leave the phone overnight or go to do other things with it while the music is paused, it seems to "forget" your location in the current song and on your playlist so that it forgets where you were in the queue. This is really frustrating that it seems to store this information in RAM instead of on the HD.

Great post/letter Steve.

Although IOS 9.2 has improved the shuffle with less of the repeat nonsense, I have also found that the shuffle will play the same artist often after playing them once. I believe others also mentioned this, but can't find the posts right now, (might be the vodka). I have a playlist right now of about 900 songs. Not sure how many artists in the playlist, but probably over 200, if not a lot more. Some artists have maybe 10 songs, while other artists only have 1 or 2 songs.

Anyway, when a certain artist's song plays, I will hear maybe 3 other songs from that artist during the next 10 songs. This happens all the time, so I can't believe it's just a coincidence. So frustrating....

I've been noticing this behavior (repeating the artist) for some time now with previous operating systems so it's not new to 9.2. I found it annoying, but not nearly as much as hearing three songs twice in one day on a 2500 song library.