[Playlists] Spotify Connect bugs with large playlists

[murre95]

Plan

Premium

Device

Spotify Connect (tested) on Chromecast, naim Mu-so Qb from SGS9, Thinkpad x240, home-built desktop PC

Operating System

Tested on Android, Windows 10, Ubuntu 16.04

My Question or Issue

There are several problems when using Spotify Connect with a large playlist. My playlist is roughly 4500 songs and 290h long but I had the problem when it was around 3500 songs too. The most common use case for me is with an SGS9 connected to a naim Mu-so Qb speaker over our home wi-fi with Spotify Connect so the issues will be explained from that point of view below. Updating the Spotify app on the devices has not helped. The issues I experience are, elaborated on further down:

-1. Small shuffle sample

-2. Broken queue view

-3. Maximum one song queued at a time

-4. Unable to skip/change song

-5. Wrong song information

-1. Small shuffle sample

The shuffle feature does not work as it should, since it does not use the entire playlist or even a large portion of it for shuffling. Rather it uses a sample of 100-some random songs from the playlist that loop in the same order over and over.

-2. Broken queue view

When I queue songs there are a few issues with the queue view. Sometimes they do not show up in the queue view at all. Sometimes they show up and to some degree shuffle for a few seconds. Sometimes they show up but as multiple copies of the first song that is queued, for for instance if I queue 'song1', 'song2' and 'song3' you would expect the queue to look like

'song1'

'song2'

'song3'

But instead, it looks like

'song1'

'song1'

'song1'

This leads me to the next issue.

-3. Maximum one song queued.

The issues above with the queue view occur when opening the view for the first time. If you exit the queue view and re-open it, it will instead not show ANY songs queued at all. However, when the next song comes around it is in fact the most recently queued that is played, despite the queue view showing previously showing no songs queued. After that song, the previously queued songs are not played but the next song in the playlist/shuffle sample is played instead.

For example, suppose I queue 'song1', 'song2', and 'song3' (in that order) while 'songx' is the current song playing and 'songy' is the next one to be played outside the manual queue. I open the queue view once and one of the problems mentioned in -2. occurs. I close the queue view, then re-open it. No songs are shown to be queued. When 'songx' finishes playing, 'song3' will start playing. When 'song3' finishes playing, 'songy' will start playing. 'song1' and 'song2' are never played.

In short, the user experience is that you can only queue one song at a time and not know if it will play until it is supposed to be playing. Note that this is not always the case. It seems to happen randomly to some degree, since sometimes queuing multiple songs works fine.

-4. Unable to skip/change song

Very frequently I have the problem that I cannot skip song at all while casting with Spotify Connect. In other words there are essentially three issues here. One, pressing the skip forward/skip to previous/pause buttons does nothing. They stop responding completely under these conditions. Two, pressing a song in the large playlist has no effect whatsoever (i.e. I cannot choose a specific song to be played from the playlist). Three, I cannot press the 'Shuffle Play' button to get a new random song or shuffle sample.

The tedious workaround I have found is that I can disconnect from Spotify Connect and start playback locally on my device, start shuffle play/the song I want to play and THEN cast on Spotify Connect again. Problem is that when this is done, the problem of -4. comes back into play and the queue is completely cleared.

-5. Wrong song information

Very often when the problems above occur, I also have the problem that the song information being shown on my device (album cover, song name, song duration, current played time, artist name etc.) belongs to a different song. Sometimes it's the previous/next song, sometimes it's a song that is on the playlist but that has not been played recently or is about to be played, sometimes it's a song from another play context that I may have played earlier. It also tends to lag/stutter when I skip songs, making it more or less impossible to know how I should navigate to the song I want to hear.

Here are a few examples that show similar problems with big playlists, specifically concerning the shuffle sample size as described in -1. which occurs independently of Spotify Connect. This is also an issue that I have had for at least 4 years (back when the playlist was <2000 songs).

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/BUG-Within-large-playlists-shuffle-stops-working-as-...

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Shuffle-is-broken-on-big-playlists/td-p/1664984

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Shuffle-bug-for-large-playlists/idi-p/2450744

https://community.spotify.com/t5/iOS-iPhone-iPad/Shuffle-only-shuffling-small-subset-of-large-playli...

Hopefully, you can look into these issues and solve them to a sufficient degree ASAP. If you need more information, please let me know.

[roodmuziek]

I hope I am at the right place to provide my two cents regarding shuffle with Spotify Connect. Please indicate if otherwise!

On Android (Xiaomi Mi 9 SE, Spotify 8.5.30.579), I can confirm the shuffle issue while using Spotify Connect. I cast audio to my iEast M5 Audiocast streamer. It appears to shuffle through all of the songs of the playlist audio-wise, but It appears to shuffle through only a subset of songs over Spotify Connect, and I encounter incorrect information as well. This appears to affect the following aspects of the app, showing incorrect information anywhere:

• the player in the notification area,
• the bottom player bar,
• the "currently playing" view and
• the entire song queue.

Anything I do in the app (skip song, toggle shuffle off and back on, change of volume - both up and down, open song queue, close song queue, turn repeat on, turn repeat off) seems to trigger change of information in all of the aspects of the app to (yet another incorrect) song/queue of songs.

My step to reproduce are as follows:

1. navigate to a playlist (I tested this with a playlist containing 346 songs, and one containing 898 songs).
2. tap a song (triggering non-shuffled playback)
3. open the "currently playing" screen (by tapping the bottom player)
4. press shuffle (which triggers the first time that information "shuffles" incorrectly)
5. From now on, everything you do (as mentioned before) triggers a change of information to information from a different (wrong) song. This sometimes triggers changing songs twice.

There is one way that I as a user can escape this behavior: I can open Spotify on desktop, and "take over" playback with my audio streamer. Steps to reproduce a user-side fix:

1. Open Spotify on desktop
2. Press "available devices"-icon
3. Select the audio streamer from which you are already streaming
4. At this point Spotify on desktop takes over the streaming, immediately switching songs. But this time, the information is correct.
5. Also, at this point, the Android app does show correct information again, even when performing all of the actions as mentioned above (toggling shuffle off and on, repeat on/off, volume up/down, skip song, open queue).

This proves to me that shuffle on Spotify Connect is broken on Android, mixing things up terribly.

[roodmuziek]

Correction to my earlier reply: I actually CAN confirm the limited amount of songs that are being played over Spotify Connect while shuffling through a playlist. While I listen to a playlist, I hear just a few songs, over and over.

[Carnager]

I experience difficulties as well using Spotify with a 'Spotify Connect' stereo network receiver by Yamaha.

What I have been experiencing the last year and a half or thereabouts, when deleting some tracks from the currently playing playlist, a next/previous track command skips down the number of deleted tracks as far as the reproduced audio is concerened, while sometimes showing the trackname and coverart of the track that should be played, and other times that of the track which is actually playing. Consecutively the next/previous track buttons are broken and fast forwarding / rewinding within the currently playing track is also broken as it confuses times between the two tracks I think.

Now this was easily remedied by hitting the play button in front of the number I actually wanted to hear in the playlist view.

However........ Now this issue started somewhere over half a year ago, before that time it was fine, the play button in front of the tracks stopped functioning and I cannot doubleclick a track to make it play either. (I can still go to another playlist and start that one by clicking the play button or doubleclicking the track itself, but this doesn't restore the previously playing playlist's functionality!)

My only fix for now is to disconnect 'Spotify Connect', then all buttons and functions revert to their working order, start playback of my preferred track and reconnecting 'Spotify Connect', after which the playlist issue gets reinstated but I can at least skip ahead/back tracks and within the track.

It seems large playlists are the culprate in this combination and it might be a shortcoming in the protocol itself, at least partly, as it requires control data to correctly be transferred back and forth between the Windows client and the audio receiver ('Spotify Connect' device.)

Still it's a letdown Spotify didn't discover / fix this for themselves as these bugs have been around for quite a while now. I'm sure the majority of people experiencing this aren't even on these forums and actually many people are affected by the bug, stuck in a puzzled state and switching everything off and on again to get things to work for at least a little bit more. I know I was, using my makeshift solutions anyway..