Played episodes are skipped

[goofyshnoofy]

Plan

Premium

Country

USA

Device

iPhone 12 Pro Max

Operating System

iOS 15.4.1

Spotify Version

8.7.30.1342

My Question or Issue

The last few days, anytime I've played a podcast, it has been playing the next episodes incorrectly. When I finish or skip to the end of an episode, no matter what, it plays the next unplayed or partially played episode, instead of whatever episode is next chronologically. It skips previously played episodes, and only plays episodes marked as unplayed, partially played or both. I like to listen to podcasts through over and over, episode after episode and sometimes starting in the middle, and now I cannot listen to episodes I've already heard before if I let it auto play. If you look at the queue, it shows that it is only going to play those episodes, so it definitely decides that this is the right order at some point. Selecting played episodes and them to the queue works, but is a ridiculous solution if, for instance, I want to listen to a podcast's episodes from 3 years ago I've already listened to for 10 hours while I work. I'd need to queue every single episode for that 10 hours, and if I ran out of episodes, I would need to scroll back through hundreds of episodes to find where I was, because it's skipped forward a year to the next half-played episode, and the podcast list scrolls to the current episode when you select the podcast again from something like the home page. It's incredibly annoying and frustrating, especially when my played podcasts auto-played too last week.

This behaviour is limited to my account and only on my iOS device. I created another, free account to test if it was the same, but when I logged into the new account from the iOS device, it played in the right order, without skipping. And when I play podcasts from my Macbook Pro, they play as expected too, chronologically and without skipping anything. However, my Macbook Pro's Spotify app doesn't seem to understand the queue playing on my iOS device, and defaults to some random, old queue from weeks ago that doesn't exist anymore. And, if start playing from my Macbook Pro and transfer to the iOS device or select the episode for my iOS device to play from my Macbook Pro, it uses the correct order and plays played episodes.

You can see all of this in the videos. They show the behaviour from both devices, recording at the same time. The iOS video shows:

1. a partially played episode selected

2. Spotify skips over 2 played episodes when swiping to the next episode

3. Spotify skips over 2 played episodes when swiping to the previous episode

4. Spotify skips over 2 played episodes when swiping to the next episode

5. Spotify plays the next unplayed episode when swiping to the next episode

6. another partially played episode is selected

7. Spotify plays the next partially played episode when swiping to the next episode twice

8. a played episode, Episode X, is selected and partially played

9. the episode right before Episode X is selected

10. Spotify plays partially-played Episode X when swiping to the next episode

11. Spotify skips over 1 played episode when swiping to the next episode

12. the queue is showed, displaying the incorrect order

The macOS video shows how the Spotify app get confused by the iOS device's queue, and flits back and forth between the incorrect queue and the iOS queue when a new episode is played

Things tried:

- restarting the device

- logging out and logging back in

- uninstalling Spotify

- marking all episodes as played

- marking all episodes as unplayed

- switching sort order

- filtering and unfiltering played episodes

This has made Spotify podcasts unusable. It has ruined the way I listen to podcasts and has induced a ridiculous amount of frustration and annoyance at a product that worked perfectly before. I think I read somewhere that this is an experimental feature that is being tried out, and if that is true -- it needs to stop, it is awful, and completely stops me from being able to use Spotify to play podcasts. It is a bad feature that should at the very least be toggleable. Please help, I would really like to be able to listen to my podcasts on Spotify again, it was by far the most convenient, straightforward and user-friendly interface for podcasts until this, and I genuinely relied on it for a lot of my time during the day. Now it is, I want to repeat, unusable.

[goofyshnoofy]

Another note on why queueing episodes doesn’t work — if I decide halfway through that 10 hour session of queued episodes that I don’t want to listen to that podcast anymore, I still have 5 hours of podcast in my queue that I need to get rid of before I can listen to anything else. It’s incredibly frustrating.

[Sir_Doughnuts]

As someone who fall asleep listening to podcasts this is also a very annoying change as podcasts I haven’t listened to now just get skipped and while this may be good for some people at the very least I agree that this should be a toggle able feature

[Kiril]

Hi there @goofyshnoofy,

Thank you for posting in the Community! 

We understand your frustration with this experience as a user, however the queues being different between devices through Connect is currently expected, as well as the skipping of played podcast episodes. This is the reason why Spotify plays the episodes on your Mac and doesn't play them on the phone - they are just not marked as played on your Mac device. This is also why your new account plays all the episodes in order, as they are not yet played for that account at all. 

One thing you can do as a workaround is basically unmark the episodes you've just listened as unplayed for the device you're currently using and this way they will not get skipped. Another way is to add all relevant episodes to a new playlist where they should be played without automatic skips being treated as regular tracks. You can also reorder them inside that playlist as you wish using the desktop app.

Hope this helps clarify things. Don't hesitate to give us a shout if there's anything else we can help with.

[goofyshnoofy]

Hi Kiril,

Thanks for taking the time to get back to me.

Unfortunately, your response isn't really helpful at all. This change is flat-out awful, and the worst change Spotify has made. It has stopped me using Spotify altogether for podcasts, when it used to be perfect. The workarounds are terrible. They require me to either completely ditch tracking my listening (which is a problem, full stop), with the added hassle of having to change that setting over and over again because I frequently listen to podcast episodes I've already listened to, or have a ton of playlists I'm constantly updating (which do not work well for podcasts), because "all relevant episodes" is every episode in all of my podcasts -- that's ridiculous.

While you're right that the episodes skip on other devices if marked as played on my main account, you're wrong that the second account does too. It behaves normally, without skipping played episodes. You can see this behavior in the attached video. And this also doesn't address the issue of discontinuity between the devices. Why is my Mac showing a completely wrong current song and queue whenever my phone tries to play a podcast?

Why on Earth have these changes been made? Why aren't they toggleable? Why is this only affecting that account?

[spacemonaut]

I also find this to be a severe problem, and searched multiple places for any option to disable this setting.

How would you feel if you were doing a rewatch of a TV series with this behaviour? Say, you're watching all of season 1 and 2 again in order to start season 3. At the end of every single episode, the application just skips to the start of season 3. Would that be ok? Or it skips to that episode in the middle of season 2 you consciously chose not to watch.

Or if you were listening to your favourite album — would it be OK if it just slipped the songs you'd heard before?

There's an entire major use case of podcasts this behaviour makes Spotify untenable for.

[cameronjacob74]

I also find this to be a massive issue as I use Spotify podcast for myself and my kids. I’ll start coco melon or whatever for them and next thing you k ow my 5 year old is listening to the frikken history of the French Revolution.