Request for feedback: Shuffle

It seems that there is a huge difference between the behaviour that John M. says we should be experiencing and what we are actually experiencing.  I did a bit of testing yesterday with a playlist of ten tracks and it did indeed behave like John said.  So why I have and I and others experienced problems with actual playlists?

Could it be that there is at least one other variable that is causing the Sonos shuffle to break?

1.  Number of songs in playlist?
2. Playlists created outside of Sonos and then imported??

Just thinking aloud really.....

I really hope this upgrade is realeased soon!

I have just read John M's post and find it amazing (and worrying) that he does not at least touch on or even mention that a colleague (Ben) is working on the shuffle issue! I'm sorry, I just don't get it! Does John know Ben? Does left hand know what right hand is doing? Will we get a working shuffle? Who knows?
Hi John,

Why would I want to clear my queue every time I want to use Sonos? I want to come in the house, press play, and listen to my entire music collection in the queue from where I left off. Simple.

I don't want to faff around with clearing queues, toggling shuffle on and off or scrolling to a new start point to make up for the system deficiencies.

I, along with many others on this thread, am simply staggered at how such a simple tweak has taken over two years to get to this point - whatever this point is. You could *literally* build a whole new product in that time.

Ed

I agree Stuart. I did similar testing by loading a single album with 8 songs and it behaves perfectly as you would expect. But when I have my 1800 song playlist I try to play each day it does not. 

My hunch is it is in the grouping/ungrouping. If you have several players grouped and ungroup one it goes back to where that queue was loaded. That I have experienced multiple times. So when you re-group them does that affect it?

wow 
@Scott

Got it.  Using Play Now will insert that track into the shuffled order of you queue (and immediately skip forward) to it, at which point the rest of the tracks will continue on in the shuffled order.  Playing Now doesn't 'reset' the position in the queue though, tracks that have already played once should not play again.

One thought - do you ever pick a specific track out the the queue and play it?  That would basically jump position in the shuffled queue and would move you up or down in the list of shuffled tracks.  If you moved up, you'd be replaying tracks that have already been heard, if you moved down, you'd be skipping over tracks you haven't heard yet.

Ultimately, none of this is obvious while you're using the product, which is part of the issue.  I'm asking these questions and explaining some of this behavior so that we can make sure what we're working on meets everyone's expectations of what shuffle should do in the future.  

We may want to revisit what you're seeing in your home when there's an opportunity for you to use the updated version in the future.  As Ben said above, when that's an option via a public beta, we'll let everyone in this thread know.

I have just read John M's post and find it amazing (and worrying) that he does not at least touch on or even mention that a colleague (Ben) is working on the shuffle issue! I'm sorry, I just don't get it! Does John know Ben? Does left hand know what right hand is doing? Will we get a working shuffle? Who knows?
@Gary H

Hi Gary, we don't communicate release dates for software updates or public beta programs in advance.  I know that can be frustrating sometimes, but it's our policy to make sure our new stuff is 100 percent ready before we communicate when it's coming out.

We'll let you know here as soon as the opportunity to get your hands on the next version (via public beta) is available.

I agree Stuart. I did similar testing by loading a single album with 8 songs and it behaves perfectly as you would expect. But when I have my 1800 song playlist I try to play each day it does not. 
The entire group management needs a major overhaul.

We should be able to define virtual groups and save those including equalizer settings, calibration profiles and playlist information. 

This is something that should have been implemented years ago, The easy Sonos  experience really goes south once one has to fiddle with all those settings over and over again.

I have just read John M's post and find it amazing (and worrying) that he does not at least touch on or even mention that a colleague (Ben) is working on the shuffle issue! I'm sorry, I just don't get it! Does John know Ben? Does left hand know what right hand is doing? Will we get a working shuffle? Who knows?
@Edward Sylvester

We hear you and we want to make it simpler for you too.  Right now it's not at all intuitive what shuffle actually does, so I understand why it's frustrating.

It sounds like what you're doing right now will do what you want.  Add the music to queue, and play / pause whenever you need to turn your music on or off.  You'll get all your music in the queue played in a set, shuffled order.  If you want to change that shuffled order, toggle shuffle to create a new ordering of the same tracks.  

We're working to make this more intuitive to use than it is now.  We'll keep you posted.

@Stuart

Thanks for thinking out loud, it's helpful.  I don't think either #1 or #2 should be impacting the shuffle mode, but I am verifying that this is the case and will report back here to let you know.

I have just read John M's post and find it amazing (and worrying) that he does not at least touch on or even mention that a colleague (Ben) is working on the shuffle issue! I'm sorry, I just don't get it! Does John know Ben? Does left hand know what right hand is doing? Will we get a working shuffle? Who knows?
@John- That's not how I feel it's working...

wow 
I never pick a track from the que... There doesn't seem to be an order to what's in the queue, so even if I wanted to it's difficult to find it. I look forward to running a beta version... It would be nice to be able to back this up with some real data about what was played… even if all it had was some kind of guid for the song so we could see what did duplicate... along with what other events might be jostling the que.