Queue ignores playlist and repeats 4-5 tracks

[gran_cabrón]

Plan

Premium

Country

US

Device

Moto X4

Operating System

Android 9

My Question or Issue

I have a playlist with a series of albums that play through in-order because there's a story. There are roughly 100 songs in the playlist, and I do have the playlist downloaded to save on mobile data. If I start playing the playlist and look at the queue, it shows the normal 80 songs you would expect.

However, spotify can seldom play all the way through the playlist because it will randomly cut off the queue to only 4 or 5 songs. This tiny segment of the playlist will play and then the music will stop (or switch to [artist] radio). There is no indication that this is happening until the music stops.

I figured out what was happening when I turned on repeat. Once the queue gets cut off, spotify will repeat those 4-5 songs only. If I skip to the previous song, it will skip "backwards" to the last song on the queue, as if I had built a tiny playlist.

It tends to happen most often when I am connected to my car or my JBL Flip 5 via bluetooth. I can sometimes induce this error by skipping a song with the forward button, or restarting a song with the back button.

I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling a clean app according to the instructions I've seen linked on so many other questions, but the problem still occurs. Given the absolute clownshoes design of spotify's queue in general, is this somehow just the intended behavior of spotify's queue, or some feature that I'm just using wrong?

[ChrisWho]

Most recent occurrence today, approx 8pm, GMT+10, Triple J Top 100 2022 playlist, tracks 15 to 19.  Before that, yesterday approx 11am, GMT+10, Discover Weekly playlist.  Before that, Friday at approx 8am, GMT+10, 80s Mix playlist and I had to listen to the same 4 tracks for a freaking hour because I was driving to work and my phone was in my pocket.  Is that enough information?

[Pete-L]

This time I took screenshots to illustrate what's going on (although I think it's pretty clear already).

You can see from the player that "Are you gonna be my girl" is playing from the playlist P4 (as indicated by the green ellipses). The screenshot of the queue again shows we're playing that song from that playlist - but also only shows four more songs in the queue. Meanwhile the screenshot of the playlist clearly shows there are more than four remaining songs in the playlist P4 below the current song.

It's that simple: your code is copying five songs from the current playlist at the current song and then giving up. If you have even one competent software engineer at Spotify this should be trivial to track down and fix!

[bettybex]

I don’t want to tempt fate but this hasn’t happened to me for a week or so.

Not sure if this helps the Tech team but with me everything would be fine until I paused the playlist. That always seemed to result in Spotify ‘forgetting’ what had already been played and repeating batches of songs in the same order they’d already been played in.

But I’m pleased to say that over the last week or so I’ve not noticed it but it had made me consider using an alternative provider, as painful as that would have been.

[Lyubka]

Hey there folks,

Thanks for your patience.  

We couldn't reproduce this behavior on our end. We can't commit to a specific timeline for the issue to be fixed however, we will try to improve the overall performance of the app. 

In the meantime please make sure to keep your app up to date so you don't miss any important fixes or features.

Cheers! 

[Pete-L]

That's ridiculous. You have dozens of people telling you this happens almost constantly. I've given you screenshots showing exactly what happens and you just come back with "we couldn't reproduce it"?  As a software engineer myself I find that inconceivable. This is a major bug; playlists fundamentally don't work if your app just decides it's only going to play five tracks in a loop. Seriously, this is an app I pay for and which isn't fit for its most basic use case. If you didn't reproduce it, you really didn't try anywhere near hard enough.

[moskrin]

This is a case where the routine to choose the next song isn't doing what
we expect.

I just typed this long thought process I went through and got to some parts
where the decisions of what to do are not immediately clear. I'm leaving
it rather than deleting it on the off chance it sparks a thought that might
be useful. The final question stands though... I think it might help if we
knew what's supposed to be happening step by step.


As a software engineer myself, if I were going to build this, I'd want the
server to maintain the queue. When my account says to play Playlist, make
the queue the contents of that playlist. If I asked to shuffle it, random
sort it and make it the queue. So then when any client logged in as me
needs the next song to play, unshift the queue and that's the song. Maybe
for mid-song continuation on another device it can update the current song
on the server for handoff, but that shouldn't affect the queue. I could see
maybe caching the next bit of the queue on a mobile client in case of
spotty connectivity and a downloaded playlist, so then when the client gets
connectivity back a few songs later then what happens... I guess we'd have
to tell the server we've just played these songs since last we spoke...
That could get tricky, but if we literally just kept track of that, last
song id's played and last timestamp we talked to the server, as long as the
songs we claim we played are the next part of the queue that should be
fine, just skip those... I feel like in here is where it gets complicated
and there must be a problem... What happens when the client and server
disagree? I'm inclined to say the server's list should always win and if
it results in skipping a couple of songs from the list that's still better
than repeating them back to back, but not everybody might agree with that
and it kind of depends on the playlist... If it's just like 10 songs you
don't want to skip 2, but if it's 200 songs probably it wouldn't even be
noticed. So is how this actually works something you'd be willing to share
a general description of so we can try to understand the system we're
using?

[Pete-L]

Yes the server should have the queue.

The rest is easy. If a song is streamed by a client, the server knows that and so knows the position in the queue. If a client has a song downloaded locally and plays that song, the client phones home to spotify and the server just updates its record of what's been played.

When a new client connects it gets the queue from the server and carries on.

At worst, if you play a bunch of downloaded songs and don't have an internet connection, when you connect from a different client you'll replay some songs - but at least the queue will still be what you expect rather than just five songs long. And being offline is an edge case these days.

In no universe can there be a case for the code to just copy five tracks from somewhere in the middle of a playlist, tell you which playlist is playing (thus indicating at least that much information made it to the client) and give you the middle finger.

[moskrin]

The trick with the client updating the server seems to be multiple
clients. I'm often at a position in the queue on my phone, then I listen
for a bit on my computer, then go back to my phone and it's still back
where it left off, so I get a chunk of songs repeated, but the computer
client keeps up with what's playing so will jump back to where the phone
left off even though it's backwards. I like that if I leave off mid-song
that I can resume on another device, but if the original device doesn't
know what's happened then it gets awkward.

[gran_cabrón]

I don't think that's the issue. I listen (almost) exclusively on my android. Switching between wired headphones and bluetooth speakers (car or JBL Flip5) can cause the issue, as can playing on one speaker, disconnecting from that speaker (turning off the car or the Flip5), and then connecting again (getting back in the car after shopping, or turning on the Flip5 again). None of those instances involve changing clients.

I've never experienced the issue on my desktop (or switching between phone w/wired headphones and desktop), nor while using my android to control a google home device, nor while casting to a smart TV.

[ChrisWho]

Yesterday 7pm GMT +10. Release Radar. 

Today 9am GMT +10. Discover Weekly. 

[gran_cabrón]

I just experienced this issue when connecting physical wired headphones to my Android Pixel 5a.

Playlist: the album "Carousel (An Examination of the Shadow, Creekflow, and its Life as an Afterthought)" 

US

CST time zone 

2:06 PM

[carbonthief]

I'm having this same problem and it's driving me crazy.  It's like Spotify forgets it was playing a playlist, and just starts cycling whatever the next 5 or so tracks in the queue were.  It's persisted across 2 phones, a Pixel 6 and a Samsung Fold.  Usually notice it happening when I connect to my car with Android Auto.

[ukdragon]

Plan

Premium

Country

UK

Device

Samsung S21

Operating System

Android 13

My Question or Issue

My Liked Songs playlist on Shuffle has suddenly started playing the same 5 songs.

Has anyone else experienced this, and if so - how did you resolve it?

[Thor294]

This issue is still happening to me! 

[wizardcowpoke]

I am having the same exact issue. I have the Spotify app with Premium subscription on my Pixel 2 running Android 11. Occasionally while connected to my car Bluetooth, while playing an album on repeat, after a song ends the player will suddenly skip back to a previous track 4-5 tracks ago, as if that were the whole album. Skipping back or forward doesn't change anything, it just stays in that 4-5 song loop. I have not been able to induce this bug intentionally, but it has happened twice now. I can fix it by clicking play on a song in the album (as if i were starting a new listening session). This error occurs even when Spotify is open on my phone.

[Riiiederner]

I have the exact same problem. I think it first happened to me around month ago when a pop up screen about "overtaking the device" or smh lile that started to show up on Spotify when i connect to car. Also at the same time recall a function i never knew about before triggered itself, it's the one that starts playing "radio of the song" at the end of the playlist at that time i didn't pay it any attention but i guess it was after the first time this "5 song bug" happened to me and i turn off this function after that but then i started to see this bug happening often. It's sad to see this bug is almost year old and Spotify wasn't able to come up with something.

[TSF007]

So apparently this problem has been going on for quite some time. I just now encountered this issue over the last few days, first was the shuffle issue, shuffling to only similar styled songs, which turning off automix ridded me of that problem.

Now I'm having the issue that this thread of people are encountering. Perhaps it is the coding within the automix that's making the problem, I haven't noticed anybody mentioned the automix feature and I only discovered that recently as well.

I didn't encounter this issue until I turned automix off, the first time I encountered this issue, it was only 5 songs playing out of a playlist of over a thousand, and subsequently, I had to select another song by hand to get it to stop doing that. Then it was 5 songs again, but different songs. Then it was about 40-60 songs out of a playlist of about 200-300 songs, it's weird its distinct choice of songs it wants to play. The songs it does get stuck on for me has a consistency of always being in order, it doesn't just randomly select songs out of the entire group and just play them off, like this 40 to 60 songs are the last 40 to 60 songs on the playlist. Before it would be 5 songs in a row but just in a random section of the playlist. Between all the posts and comments I've read, and my recent knowledge on the automix feature being the culprit behind all my songs being quite similar on my shuffle, it seems likely that the coding within the automix and it being turned off could possibly be the source of the problem. Hope this helps, because this is surely annoying.

[Pete-L]

I've never used automix. It's more fundamental: their software sucks - and they don't care to fix it

[JeffThomas3]

This issue has restarted yesterday and today. It’s happened on multiple playlists. 

I’m using an iPhone 13 Pro Max from the latest Spotify iOS app. It happens when listening on the phone or via connect to multiple speakers. 

Issue: playlist will start. After 1 or 2 songs the app will begin repeating the same 4-5 songs repeatedly. I can manually “force” the app to move past those songs in the queue by selecting a different song. But the issue then re-presents shortly thereafter. 

note that I have tried clearing cache and it initially appeared to resolve the issue. However, the following day, in a different playlist, the issue recurred when streaming via Connect to a Sonos speaker. 

[Vasil]

Hey folks!

Sorry to see this is still ongoing.
We are going to try to prioritize this investigation in the hopes that we can finally get to the root cause and fix the issue.

If you haven't already, please let us know the following details:

• Your device + OS (+additional device (speaker, etc.) in case the issue manifests itself there)
• By rough estimations - the exact time the issue started to appear
• The last time it happened
• The number of songs that get repeated and the number of songs in the playlist overall
• The troubleshooting that has been done so far
• Any additional details/screenshots that come to mind which you believe might help us resolve the issue quicker
   

Many thanks in advance. We'll do our best to get to the bottom of this asap.