Songs keep repeating when I shuffle a playlist

Thanks! The email got forwarded to Eddie Cue's office and a 'customer experience' person got in touch. While he didn't specifically address this issue, he did say:

"I recently received your email in regards to the issues you’ve experienced since Apple Music launch. Our apologies for the inconvenience this has caused thus far. Good or Bad, we appreciate when our customers provide feedback on the user experience. Our engineers are currently working on improvements to help the matching process of previously added content to iCloud Music Library. I believe this generally will help resolve most of your issues. In the meantime, pleas make sure you update your OS and iOS version when releases become available."

I also got a iTunes Store credit to cover the cost of Apple Music for the next few months. If you're still experiencing issues, I'd recommend emailing Apple directly.

Ridiculous that this issue has persisted this long. I noticed the issue long ago but only just now had the time to spend researching online what the problem might be. I play music from my phone (on iOS 9.2 now) in my car through bluetooth. Not from a streaming service or anything, but music from my computer that I've put into iTunes and synced to my phone. And what's nice is the screen in my car will tell me what number the song is within the shuffle order (won't say out of how many, but it's not too difficult to have a rough idea of the number of songs in a playlist). So what I'm noticing is that it's not just randomly going back to songs from earlier in the playlist, it's skipping over other songs to do so. Case in point, I have a Christmas playlist of 70-something songs. I put it on random, and it plays song number 1, 2, 3, and so on and so forth, then after song 17 it'll go back to 2 randomly, then after that it'll jump back on track to number 19 having completely skipped number 18. And the closer you are towards the end of the playlist, the more often it replaces a song you haven't heard yet with one you already heard in the random shuffle. I'll reach song number 53, for example, then instead of 54 it'll jump back to 27, then 45, then 39, then 6, then 27 again, then 50 just to tease me, then 12, then finally 61, and I've missed out on 7 songs that got skipped over so that the randomizer could go back to play songs I already heard. Then if I'm not paying attention and choose to listen to number 27 and stop the music during the song because I got to where I'm going, then start it up again during my next car ride, it'll will pick up again as if it's the first time I've listened to number 27 in that run of the shuffled playlist, so 28 will be up next (if I'm "lucky"). Even more aggravating is that recently as I'm in the middle of listening to a random song, it'll randomly just fast forward to the next song, or sometimes just to a later point in the song. Or even once when a new song came on it jumped to the middle of the song to begin playing it.

I have been dealing with two Senior Techs since AM was released on various issues and supposedly - based on what one of them sent me - Apple is hoping to fix this issue and the issues with downloaded playlists in iOS 9.3. We can only wait and see.

Hey my fellow shufflers here's something else I've mentioned before and realized. If the count feature would be brought back I feel it will regulate and fix the repeated shuffle.

See where it says 1 of 101 then 82 of 101? This feature has been removed since the Apple Music launch. I really do believe it will fix our issue, Besides it also tells you when you're at the end of your shuffle and when your shuffle has started over. Just a hunch I have. I'll be sure to call Apple and refer them to this post.

I just got off the phone with Apple Care and this is what I was told to do :

It sounds like you're not switching your shuffle off when you connect it to load and charge it... try switching it to OFF, set the mode switch to shuffle (if not already in that position) and then turning it back ON and Play. IF the song order still seems the same, press Pause and then press the Play button very quickly 3 times. That should reset the the randomizer and begin at the top of the newly randomized list.

Now I don't know if that's going to work I haven't tried yet but I don't think this will solve the issue. I told Alex about this forum and told her about the missing count feature that is no longer there. She said she would forward my pic of what I'm talking about.. I just pray the update fixes the issue, I miss the counter I miss the way I listen to my music smh.

The repeated songs is just a small piece of what is so FUBAR with the ipod on the iphone. Apple is not happy enough to make $800 bucks off my iphone, they want so bad for me to subscribe to apple music (which I won't), that they have completely f'd up the ipod. If apple does not straighten out this bs with the next software update, then I will be so HELLO SAMSUNG!

Hahahahahahahaha! Yes yes yes I agree. I refuse to get Apple Music too. Thank you for the laugh. I'm still giggling at your comment. What ever happened to if it ain't broke don't fix it. Smh. Ok I digress. I'll sit back and wait to see what happens when ios 9.3 gets here.

It is such bs man. I remember when apple announced they were going to come out with a phone. I laughed so hard that I nearly wet my pants. But when I heard the ipod was gonna be built into it, I thought that would be pretty cool.... and it was. I bought the 3g, then the 4s, now I have the 6. And the whole reason I had any of them was mainly for the built in ipod.... which now s u c k s. There is really no reason for me not to be on android, since I use gmail, google calendar, google maps, google search.. etc. I have always loved the iphone, but how could they f up the ipod???????

I did an experiment over the holidays playing my Christmas Music playlist of 377 songs on my PC to my Airport Express. I reset plays, did three sessions of about five hours each on shuffle, then checked play counts. 3 songs played 3x, 43 twice, 160 once, and 171 not at all. It sounds similar to what I've been seeing on my phone. For you non engineers here, what we're looking for is called Random Sampling Without Replacement. It's a very basic statistical concept and should be within the mental grasp of engineers at Apple. They're obviously way off the mark.

I'm having the same issue and it's doing my head in. I always have playlists that have 100+ songs on and listen between the car and at work and it's constantly repeating the songs whenever you leave the phone alone for a bit and go back to it. Apple need to sort this out.

janfromwilliamson wrote:

I did an experiment over the holidays playing my Christmas Music playlist of 377 songs on my PC to my Airport Express. I reset plays, did three sessions of about five hours each on shuffle, then checked play counts. 3 songs played 3x, 43 twice, 160 once, and 171 not at all. It sounds similar to what I've been seeing on my phone. For you non engineers here, what we're looking for is called Random Sampling Without Replacement. It's a very basic statistical concept and should be within the mental grasp of engineers at Apple. They're obviously way off the mark.

From what I have read (or been told by an Apple tech - my memory is not as perfect as it was at least according to my wife), each time you re-Shuffle (meaning you don't continue from the earlier shuffle, but hit shuffle again, like you did three times), the music app will actually re-shuffle the entire playlist. So the fact that you found several songs that played 3x and 2x is not surprising. The same issue exists when you shuffle a playlist and then go to something else (Radio, a new album) and then come back to the same playlist and hit shuffle again. It won't remember what songs it played already.

I think what a lot of people are complaining about is that even without hitting Shuffle again, the iPhone - after either going to sleep or at least not playing music for a while - will repeat songs that were already played.

Now - why the app itself could not keep track of the play counts also and ignore the ones that have already been played - regardless of what title you give it - is the question.

Thanks for your analysis Swandy.

The issue is when you are playing from the same playlist without interruption, I have an old iPhone 5 I use exclusively to play music at work from a playlist of about 800 songs. I don't use this device for any other purposes and I never power it down except to update the OS. I'll play the 800 song playlist and I'll sometimes hear repeats of songs within the same day, despite the playlist being over 40 hours long and should last an entire work week without a single repeat. Old iPods and the Music app pre-Apple Music used to queue up all the tracks and show you a count ("2 of 800", "26 of 800", etc) so you know exactly how many songs are remaining before you hit the end of the list.

I believe what most of us want is just a return to that type of functionality. All iPods and iPhones were capable of doing this up until last year.

Jarathen wrote:

Sorry I didn't clarify, I did mean beta release.

Probably not going to get any responses about the beta software as people who participate in the beta programs are not supposed to post here. (I know because I did the betas for iOS 9 and El Capitan until the official releases.) You might have better luck at sites like iMore or Mac Rumors forums.

6 pages, 3 months, and one update later...no fix. Apple: Terrible, take a lap. I was so hopeful when the new update mentioned music. But still hearing the same songs after a shuffle. When I start getting many repeats I re-hit shuffle like mentioned above but inevitably it repeats again.

Why there's no fix for something that worked well on iPods of early generation? May be it's because Apple programmers don't want to change the algorithm they put in the shuffle for some commercial reasons that I don't understand... I think this thread shows many of us just want a simple shuffle, not an algorithm.