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I have had my Sonos system for many years and have uploaded and downloaded hundreds of songs into a sonos playlist. I find that the shuffle feature rarely shuffles the list very “deeply” and tends to play the same couple of dozen songs. Is there any way to teach the algorithms to shuffle through the list more thoroughly?

Hello @DouglasD , welcome to Sonos Community!

Please have a look at the following Support Article Shuffle, repeat, and crossfade songs , more specifically the below point:

Shuffle
Tap the Shuffle icon to randomize the song order in the queue. On mobile devices, navigate to the Now Playing screen and tap the 

 Queue icon to view the queue and show the Shuffle icon. On a Mac or PC, the Shuffle icon is located at the top of the screen in the Now Playing controls.

I’ve done a small research on how random shuffle is with different sources in the Sonos App. Tested on YouTube Music, Spotify and Music Library uploaded tracks and noticed a very different queue every couple of shuffle button presses.

It might have been luck by definition of randomness, though I do understand there is a chance specific tracks being repeated more often.

Is there any way to teach the algorithms to shuffle through the list more thoroughly?

Maybe some extra checks and flags on each shuffle button press would help, making it less random in a way.

I’ve marked this thread as a feature request and forwarded it to the appropriate teams for consideration.

 


In my experience the shuffle is not so random. It requires some manual effort, but you can move a few tracks in the Queue in order to improve the randomness.


What I’m hearing so far is there really isn’t a solution that doesn’t require manual intervention (repeatedly hit the shuffle icon). I should hand mentioned that my controllers are MacBook Pro, IPad and IPhones. 


Years ago (more than a decade) there was some discussion about why Sonos couldn’t implement a stronger randomisation algorithm, such as Mersenne Twister. At the time the response, if I recall correctly, was that the player memory and/or CPU was insufficient.