Poor Shuffle on Amazon Fire

[carlcanyon]

I posted last year about my Amazon Fire playing the same songs over and over all day long when I play from my Songs list on shuffle. Here is the previous topic. I was able to rectify that situation with a restart of the device.

Today it is acting up again in a similar but not exact way. I'd just like to document this because I've spent the last hour of work doing analysis on this in Excel. I am listening on an Amazon Fire running version 5.9.0774 armV7 by the way. I have Shuffle on and Repeat off. I am playing from my Songs list which has somewhere north of 4,500 songs in it.

My day started with a lot of Vince Gill and Backstreet Boys with some N*Sync thrown in for good measure. Also, the only two Mos Def songs I have starred were played within minutes of each other. I thought maybe it was a fluke, but as the day progressed I noticed a lot of other artists repeating. I finally paused my music after a few hours and a few repeated songs to look ahead in the queue to see what Spotify was going to play next. Here's a rundown.

I logged 55 songs. Within that 55 were 30 artists. 14 of the artists had more than one song in the list this includes 7 artists with 2 songs, 4 artists with 3 songs, and 3 artists with 4 songs. The vast majority of artists with only one song in the list had only one song starred in my playlist hence only showing up once in the list of 55. Among the artists with more than one song in the list, all but one of them had more than half of their starred songs (as lead artist) in the list of 55. Some of them had all of their starred songs in the list. This indicates a propensity for my app to play all of an artists starred tracks within a short span of time.

There seemed to be something that was matching an artist across multiple groups they are in. For example, I have a song by Alison Krauss in the list along with a song by Alison Krauss & Union Station. Those are separate artists in Spotify even though Alison Krauss is the lead (*Note that she is not credited separately in Alison Krauss & Union Station). I also have the following artists showing in the list which I listed as Gloria Estefan as the lead artist: Gloria Estefan; Miami Sound Machine; Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine. These are all different artists within Spotify. Two other weird things are the combination of Stone Temple Pilots and Temple of the Dog in the list along with Little Big Town and Little Anthony. Finally, I have 5 different artists in the list whose name begins with the word "The." That's just some anecdotal evidence that my app might be finding artists with similar artist names.

Finally, I noticed that the artists who had multiple songs in the list seemed to be clustering a bit. For example, the Vince Gill, Alison Krauss, and Backstreet Boys songs seemed to come at the beginning of the list while Chevelle and Jane's Addiction were clustered at the end. Mary Chapin Carpenter was in the middle with a distance of 6 songs and Travis Tritt and Gloria Estefan were spread out a little bit more.

I'll restart my device again and see if it corrects the problem. I just think it is interesting (albeit a bit annoying) how this software works sometimes.

[carlcanyon]

Oh Man! I just posted this and skipped my playlist up to a song by an artist named Grace Potter where I didn't recognize either the artist or the song. The song is "Something That I Want" which is from the Tangled soundtrack. I just heard another some from that soundtrack this morning as well which has to be the only two songs I have starred from that soundtrack. It's also peculiar because I also heard a song from Loreena McKennitt from a Tinker Bell movie soundtrack today too which I haven't heard in a long time. It's not very strong evidence of anything, but it does add to the mystique of this algorithm.

[carlcanyon]

I've restarted the device today and the app has tried to pick up where it left off. The upcoming songs list has changed but it is still showing the same trends with most of the same artists. I see more Vince Gill and Gloria Estefan. Janet Jackson is now showing up with 3 or 4 songs out of ~50. Jessica Simpson and Ashlee Simpson are here again (they each played once yesterday). Nirvana, NIN, and Jane's Addiction all have 3 songs or more. Alison Krauss also has many more songs showing up. 

I've skipped past them all to end last song. More songs showed up, but only about 10 with more of the same artists. I skipped to the last song in that list and the upcoming list was empty so I pressed the skip forward button and the entire list has just started over. Apparently this is the same issue that I faced last year where the same list of songs repeats over and over.

I am going to my Starred playlist (from Songs) to see if I continue to experience this. It will take a while before I start seeing repeats though.

[carlcanyon]

It's been a few days and I haven't been at my desk much playing music. Today I have spent a little bit of time at my desk and I noticed a different trend which might explain the previous trends.

Just a little while ago I had heard a song that I just starred a few days ago. In fact it is the second most recent song I starred. I heard another song that I starred by Royce da 5'9" recently play and only two songs later I heard another song from the same album. I decided to look through my upcoming songs list (from the shuffle) and it was all of the most recent songs that I have starred including four more songs from that same Royce da 5'9" album. The entire list of 50+ songs looked to be songs from the most recent 100 or so songs I have starred (out of 4,600).

Not that anybody is reading this or cares, but here is my theory. My Spotify app is shuffling songs from within a specific range of songs in my list. It was easy to identify that with the most recent songs played because I know that I had starred them all very recently. It is harder to tell with songs I starred a long time ago, BUT I think it explains what has been happening over the last few days because of the way I have starred songs historically.

I have been seeing a lot of repeats of songs by artists even when their songs are listed under different artist names (e.g. Alison Krauss versus Alison Krauss & Union Station). The reason I might have been seeing this is because when I star songs I typically will review an artists catalog for all songs I like from them so they all get starred one after another in a block. If Spotify is shuffling songs from a particular section of my list of 4,600 songs then it is bound to have a lot of artist repeats.

Furthermore, when I originally posted this I was getting similar songs from different artists entirely. For instance, I noted that I had songs from two different Disney soundtracks play. I had a lot of Vince Gill and Travis Tritt play. I had songs by Jessica Simpson and Ashlee Simpson play. When I star songs I tend to hunt for related music. For example, if I star some 90s country I will check related artists lists and star more 90s country songs. If I am thinking about a Disney soundtrack song I like it might spur me to think of other Disney soundtrack songs I like. If I star Ashlee Simpson I might think about Jessica Simpson and check her songs list for something I might want to add.

OK, so now I have identified what the app is doing but I still don't know why or how to correct it. It's on the Amazon version of the app which I think is a bit behind to Google Play version since I just updated the Amazon version earlier this week and it is still behind in version number from the app on my Android phone. I don't imagine that the Amazon Appstore version of the app is a priority for Spotify.