Songs keep repeating when I shuffle a playlist

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.

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.