Songs keep repeating when I shuffle a playlist

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.

THIS SHUFFLE BUG NEEDS TO BE FIXED. 😠

SHUFFLE on my iphone does not work without repeating songs as discussed in this thread. Seems fine in itunes on my desktop - so why the iphone is not working???

It really ***** - I can't make it through my playlist and hear all of my songs because when I come back I hear same songs again.

Is there maybe another MUSIC PLAYING APP that we can use? Surely there must be a player where shuffle works on the iphone.

It's very clear this is a problem and is very distressing that there is no way to find out if there is a fix or if Apple is even working on this. This really ***** and is frustrating. Even though this "bug" affects a lot of people who passionately are upset about it there seems to be no hope.

How do big companies get away with this poor kind of customer support?

Oh man, the shuffle-repeat issue has been driving me absolutely up the wall. This is like proverbial Chinese torture. Why on Earth would Apple remove this feature? It worked great before! Utterly unfathomable!

This shuffle business was driving me nuts as well. I have found a fix that I actually prefer over just shuffling now. I utilize multiple nested smart playlists to keep things fresh in what I am listening to, but still favor things I like more. I also switch back and forth throughout the day between my iPad and my iPhone for listening. One other quick thing to mention has been pointed out in this thread before I think; your playlist sync's to your device in the same "sort order" as you have displayed in iTunes.

Knowing that, if you click on the left most sort column in playlist > songs view, it is no longer really "sorted" It's just an order. Now in your playlist settings, check the "Limit to" box, give it a number of songs, and use "random" Boom, your playlist is shuffled. AND it will stay in that order until the next time you sync. AND you can reorder songs by dragging them, if you want to hear certain songs on your commute in the morning, for example. AND when I switch from my phone in the car to my iPad at my desk, I can just start from the song I left off with in my car and start that one on my iPad. Every night I sync, I uncheck the "limit to" box and hit ok, then I edit the list again and turn the limit back on and it re-shuffles the list. I have been doing this for a few weeks now and I no longer miss "shuffle"

Hope some people find this helpful.

This is incredibly frustrating. Playlists will not shuffle on my iPhone and same song repeats over and over. I thought the problem was connected when I stopped my subscription to Beats 1, etc. I agree; until this is fixed I'm going back to Spotify.

Fix? This is about 1000000000% more trouble than nessesary for a simple shuffle.

and btw this bug is since ios8.4 and still hasn't been fixed even in the newest build of the public beta, even though I put several bug report on this

I think I may be having the same problem.

I always have my music on shuffle (so all music shuffled, not just a specific playlist)

I did the update a month or so ago to 9.2 or whatever and that's when it screwed up.

So basically in the morning commute, I have it set to shuffle and one song will play, and this will either repeat later that journey or on my journey home. I know there's loads of songs that haven't been played because it's the same ones over and over.

This is so frustrating. I've tried resets and resyncs and nothing.

So ridiculous.

I loaded up iOS version 9.3yesterday. First thing I noticed was it cut my play list sizes by 1/4 to 1/3. For example a playlist that used to have 40 songs, now has 28. Checked iTunes on my lap top to verify. Sure enough the playlist in question had 40 songs. The majority of my play lists were similarly effected. I then tried syncing my iPhone to my lap top via iTunes. After doing so, my iTunes play lists now matched the size of the play lists on my iPhone... not what I was hoping for! I am now resigned to having to go back and rebuild my playlists in iTunes so they are the size that I want them to be. Of course my concern is my iPhone will merely cut them back down to size again! I'll have to think long and hard before I try that again. Looks to me as though Apple has merely added to their music player woes.

Regarding other music player apps. I have had decent luck with Cesium. It appears to shuffle ok without repeating or skipping songs. It uses the same up next song list as Apple's music player, though so Apple's music player can still screw up the upcoming song list if given the opportunity. I try not to run the Apple music player app as a result. Other music apps I've tried that did not work well were Ecoute, VOX, EasyMP3, 3D Audio Player and Beat.

One other nice feature with Cesium is it shows how may songs are in the upcoming song lists. What's more it also shows the remaining time in the play list. Thus makes it much easier to determine if repeated songs are in the upcoming list as well as determining if it is skipping songs. I see Apple's music player app still does not do that.

Still an overall issue with Shuffle in 9.3.

Still hearing repeated tracks when shuffling all tracks (approx 2,000 - 5 days worth).

And just got this (again, out of the pool of 5 days worth of music):

Track 1 - Hot (feat Pusha T & Boo-bonic). Rosco P Coldchain. The Neptunes Presents The Clones.

Track 2 - Hot & Fun feat Nelly Furtardo (10'). N*E*R*D. Nothing.

Track 3 - Hot. The Neptunes. The Neptunes Present The Clones.

Track 4 - Hot-N-Fun (feat Nelly Furtardo). N*E*R*D. Nothing (Deluxe edition).

"Shuffle", yeah right, give me a break!