Songs keep repeating when I shuffle a playlist

I think I've figured out an alternate option. I have over 2,500 songs on my phone and seeing the same ones in the queue after I've purposely skipped them is maddening! After reading several of these comments I went into the Songs folder. In the top right-hand corner there's a red "Sort" option. I noticed that mine was sorting songs by Artist rather than Song Title. I switched it and now I'm seeing new songs! Literally just did it though so only time will tell if that's the issue we've all been encountering.

Slainte.

I have the same problem. I have a playlist with eight hours of music. Every time I played it shuffle, I seem to hear kind mostly the same songs over and over again. It looks Like if the algorithm doesn't work nicely. For sure it doesn't appear like pure random to me. And I agree, it is to be better in the previous music apps of Apple.

Occasionally, and some circumstances, the shuffle button does not even work. I press it, and it flashes red, and then goes back to unpressed.

OK after experiencing the same problem I finally found the solution this morning. Apple has for some reason the reason hidden the repeat and shuffle buttons on the main song play screen. When you select the now playing song at the bottom of the screen then you have to scroll up to see the hidden buttons that are in red. You have to uncheck the repeat button so that the red highlight goes away. This will fix your problem.

OK. I did some testing with my new phone today & you're right - internet access has nothing to do with it

what's worrying, though, is that it definitely did on iOS 9

I only bought my new phone a couple of weeks ago & until then this only ever happened when I connected to the internet

did some testing yesterday with my new iPhone 7 Plus & it happens all the time! They actually made it worse in iOS 10!!

I also had this issue. Just this morning, May 25, 2017, I pressed shuffle on my playlist that has 1400 songs. Fields of Gold comes on. Great, I like this song. 3 songs later, Fields of Gold again. Okay, I just heard it, whatever, I'm busy making breakfast for my kids so I let it play. 2 songs later, Fields of Gold. Okay what the F Apple, there's 1400 songs to choose from and I get Fields of Gold 3 times in 30 minutes. I've known about this for months, but today was the breaking point.

I thought about it for a while, and figured out how to get around it. In your smart playlist, there's a criteria that you can add around Last Played. You can set it to "is not in the last" x days. I set it to 7 days, so hopefully I won't hear the same song very often.

adding this criterion to a smart playlist doesn't work on mobile devices as they only seem to update when you sync

at least, it didn't work for me. Think I'm gonna start a new thread asking for alternative Music app recommendations

I'm not sure how you can see it on your iPod, but in iTunes you can right-click on one of the header fields on your playlist (Name, Time, Artist, Genre, etc) and a checklist will appear with all of the potential fields you can add to get more information on each song. Scroll down to Last Played and select, and it will show you the last time you played that song.

As an update to my "fix" above - it doesn't always work on mobile devices as Sam Miami points out, but somehow I feel it works better. I have an old iPhone that I keep in my house to only play music from, and it doesn't store any songs on it, only connecting wirelessly to iTunes. When the connection is bad, it repeats songs often, when the connection is good, it doesn't seem to.

I FINALLY FOUND THE SOLUTION!

After several years of dealing with this mind numbing crap (songs repeating when shuffled, shuffle turning on automatically when you don't want to shuffle, etc.) - I found the solution.

Turn off Home Sharing. For some reason, when it is on - I think the iPhone tries to connect to the Cloud, and the music playlist resets. Which is why when you are shuffling songs, pause it, and restart it later - it'll replay songs you heard earlier. It is like a reset - it starts shuffling again all over - so randomly, some songs you heard earlier will replay even though other songs you never hear.

So that's it. Turn off Home Sharing.

Well, it was working. And then sometime over the weekend, my playlist reshuffled itself again. The song that was paused was still on pause, but since the songs reshuffled - it repeated songs I had listened to recently.

Sigh.

Follow link Play, pause, and shuffle music in the Music app - Apple Support

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7127434

Someone already posted sited about this and did not get a response I too have this question

On the now playing screen there's a repeat icon to the right of the shuffle icon. Uncheck/unhighlight that and it will stop after the shuffle is done.

I Don't think we are the only ones having this I just think we are the only ones who maybe notice or are the only ones using a specific function that would make us notice... what bother me is apple trying to "fix" something that wasn't broken, it was not perfect but it still works... Now they make this new app and there has been countless problems from it. the shuffle before wasn't great but a least it semi randomized the music so you weren't hearing the same songs. Now you hear the same multiple songs over and over. Like queue was saying when he paused and out it away it wouldn't pick up where it left off (a feature that used to be in the settings menu that is gone) but also I have had it play the same song writhing 5 songs and then again in another 10 songs. And not just one specific song but different songs all with out pausing or stopping and coming back to it but while continuous play. And no I don't have repeat on nor are there multiple different files o the same song in my playlist. I have 26.5 hours of music and there maybe only 4 duplicate songs but those songs are live versions. Anyways I really hope they find a fix for this the whole point of a long playlist is to hear a variety not the same ****...