Apple Music playlist shuffle order

Hi ​@gleeok 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

I am sorry to hear of this issue you are having with Apple Music content being shuffled, but not randomly.

When a Sonos speaker (after being told to by the app) gets in touch with a music service and asks for a Playlist to be played shuffled, that is what the speaker says to the service - it is up to the service’s own logic to shuffle the playlist, and this explains why you see different results across different services. Spotify will randomly shuffle the playlist track order each time, whereas Apple Music will perform the same shuffle each time.

This does mean that there is no way that you can set an alarm that will play Apple Music content randomly shuffled, I’m afraid - the only way of getting a different shuffle order each time is to use a service that uses randomised logic to perform the shuffle, like Spotify.

Of course, you could also provide feedback to Apple Music directly that you would prefer it if the logic they used was randomised each time.

I hope this helps.

Is the Apple Music shuffle behaviour different if you create a Sonos Playlist from the Apple Music playlist, then shuffle the Sonos Playlist?

Good thinking, ​@Mr. T - I think that may well work!

I would try an “old-style” Sonos app eg Desktop, as the shuffle on these is done by the players, not the cloud service, so should work similarly across different services.

I’m not seeing anything in the SMAPI docs that indicates a cloud shuffle is even a feature, but the docs are not kept up to date any more so I could be wrong.