Enhance button was so much better than "smart shuffle"

[Ultra_Veloce]

It was a simple toggle button on your playlist and you could clearly see the songs that were added. It was intuitive and useful, so of course Spotify had to go and ruin it.

Now, with smart shuffle, the user has to figure out where are these added songs. Turns out they have to open the que page to see them and they must shuffle the songs. It's so obviously bad and clunky. 

It's like Spotify has one guy who decides what he wants without actually running it past some testers to get sensible feedback. Any rational, long-time Spotify user would prefer the Enhance button feature over this new smart shuffle. 

I've had Premium for many years but this kind of nonsense is making me consider cancelling. Enhance was such a game-changing feature.

[JustonN]

I don't want a popup for selecting which shuffle type I want to use show up every time, ESPECIALLY now that many playlists need to be shuffled manually rather than applying to everything played while slected. Create separate buttons, far less obnoxious.

(It is also my opinion that the original enhance feature was far preferred, smart shuffle is not nearly as playlist building friendly)

[Yordan]

Hi folks,

Thanks for reaching out to the Community.

We can confirm that the Smart Shuffle feature is part of an ongoing test we're currently running for Android users.

Your feedback is important so do keep on sharing it here! Let us know how you think the feature and the overall user experience can be improved. We'll forward your inputs to the right folks.

Cheers!

[RachelCCC]

Plan

Premium

Country

US

Device

Samsung

My Question or Issue

Sorry if this is a repost. I primarily listen to one play list and everything I load it it starts playing the songs in order with a few new songs mixed it. It is not shuffling my music. I have logged out and reinstalled the app.

Is there a fix coming?

[pikawolfy]

Premium Plan

USA

Google Pixel 6 Pro

Android v 13

My Question or Issue:

Spotify rolled out a new "Smart Shuffle" feature in my Android App. I do not want Smart Shuffle on when shuffling my playlist -- it automatically adds "recommended songs" to the queue. When trying to turn on "Normal Shuffle", instead it keeps defaulting to "Smart Shuffle" and adding other songs. When I try to turn shuffle off altogether, it shows me a "Removed recommendations" message, but then neither A) Removes songs from the queue, nor B) Turns off shuffle.

Please help me figure out how to turn this feature off entirely. I've messed around in the app a lot and also cleared my cache, which didn't help. I don't want to clear my storage because I have 1000+ songs downloaded.

I've attached a video that shows the behavior.

[Gf8]

I like the enhanced song feature that adds recommended songs

And I frequently use shuffle to arrange play lists for many reaaons.  Being able to use one or the other or both 

Convinced me Spotify is better than amazon, so I switched 

But...after a,short time, a "new feature" appears, literally replacing the wonderful "enhanced song suggestion " unless I shuffle it...

Which is,more irritating than Amazon ever was

So my suggestion is that spotify stop copying all the mistakes Amazon makes

Remove smart shuffle or at least let people to turn that satanic thing off and let the user choose their own automatic configurations 

And fire who ever **bleep**ed up what otherwise could have been a worthwhile steaming music ap

[BigZiw]

Spotify's suggestions have always been amazing. The developers found a way to take this to another level by adding the enhance button and the new ways of shuffling.

However, for some reason they decided to remove the enhance button from the mobile platform and add it to the desktop platform. We weren't left with nothing on mobiles though since a new way of shuffling was added. 

I really like the new way of shuffling, but I find no reason for removing the enhance option. I'd really like to have both options (in desktop app too) since I may want for example to grow a playlist by focusing on suggestions only. Back in the days when enhance was a thing on mobile platform too, I could spend endless hours enhancing my playlists. Now in order to do that I have to find a desktop. Same for shuffle with suggestions. If I want to use that, I have no option but to listen through my phone. In my opinion, having both options in all platforms will make the listening experience much better for everyone. Plus, I think that the platform will be operating much better with less conflicts in sectors like Spotify connect if the features exist in every Spotify app, regardless of the platform.

[vilreen]

For me the problem is even bigger. My app got updated with Smart Shuffle as well and I have been using Enhance for many months now. While I understand that recommendations will no longer show up in the playlist itself but rather in the queue, for me they just... don't. Any time I smart shuffle the playlist, all I get is standard shuffle from my playlist without anything new added to it.

Also, the new method is much worse for building playlists as, I imagine, it must be much harder to add a recommended song to the playlist. But I wouldn't know, as I don't any recommendations showing up in the queue now 😞

[BigZiw]

That's true. Plus when you have that enabled you can't ever search for songs in the playlist or swipe to queue

[F00bar]

Yes. There's similar requests. But they've gone against "idea guideline #6".

Idea guidelines. Stupid idea by the way.

I have a solution. It won't be a rollback. Bring the back end code back, and change the feature name to "smartify". Maybe also have a taster of the songs, instead of having to scroll through and curate them.

Rhymes with Spotify too. Should keep everyone happy.

TIA

-from a guy who just loves his music.

P.S don't do it, and I'll just make something to do it myself. But that's inefficient and annoying.

P.P.S smart shuffle is a bad idea. Don't do it.

[BigZiw]

Since it's obvious that the vast majority of users (if not everyone) prefers the enhance button over the sMaRt ShUfFlE, WHY ON EARTH did you replace it again?? I want my enhance button back and not this useless annoying "feature"

Since you see that people like the enhance button, why don't you just leave it be? Go fix something else instead of constantly removing features (like top genres)

[ArinBlackheart]

It's completely broken my app now. I've deleted and reinstalled it but it updated itself to the broken state after a couple hours. I never wanted to be part of a testing group. I just want my software to work as intended. Which it isn't. And Spotify's support response was to do what I have done including a power cycle of my phone. This is what happened when I hit next on the song that was playing when I opened the app.

[Kartenhouse]

I love the new Smart Shuffle feature on Android (and probably Apple) devices.

However, there's an annoying unexpected behaviour with the feature: It breaks sorting and filtering capabilities for playlists as long as the feature is activated for that specific playlist.

For me, this makes Smart Shiffle next to unusable as sorting and filtering my playlists are both absolutely essential for the way I use the app and interact with my playlists. 

[Rajw]

Plan

Premium

Country

Canada

Device

Iphone 7

My Question or Issue

Smart shuffle is still broken.

Why do the devs force this app breaking feature upon people without any ability to turn it off? The level of incompetence they show is genuinely mind-blowing, if I was this bad at any job I've done surely I would've been fired ages ago. It's unbelievable how long it's taking them to fix what should be a simple issue, but they refuse because they think they know what users want better than users themselves do. This problem has been around for ages, yet spotify refuses to fix it and they respond with meaningless platitudes about "looking into it" whenever posts are made about this issue. This issue should have been fixed ages ago, but here I am still posting about this after it's been toggled repeatedly without any input from me. 

[lukaestrada]

Smart shuffle is so bad. I prefer the enhance button 100%. I need to press the aleatory button 3 times and it is so slow.

[Nordica]

Yeah, I definitely preferred the enhance button over the smart shuffle.

[drance]

Smart shuffle is terrible.  Enhanced play lists are good. I want to choose the order I hear songs. 

[zackshapiro]

The user interface seems to keep going between the older ui with smart shuffle from a few months back to a bottom of the screen ui with the enhance button

[Nordica]

With every new update to the android app Im hoping the smart shuffle will disappear but sadly no. Smart shuffle seems to not exist on albums but only on the own playlists. Im trying to find a loophole but so far nothing. 
I use shuffle on and off on a specific playlist with almost 10,000 songs, its painfully slow and buggy with that when I try to change to non shuffle. So far I have been using the web spotify to control my phone playing when possible since the web and desktop thankfully don't have smart shuffle.

[Bobsagget97]

In the last week I’ve lost two things I love. The superior intuitive and superior heart button and my beloved enhance feature. 

The last few months I’ve been singing Spotifys praises but after these two losses I’m seriously considering swapping to another streaming service. I really don’t want to. At this point the only reason I’m sticking around is swapping would be a pain. 

I just hope they listen to us and bring back the wonderful enhance feature. I noticed it as soon as it was gone and I’ve missed it. Smart shuffle just isn’t the same.