Skip to main content

The way Sonos implements its Shuffle feature is super annoying. For any given playlist, if I hit shuffle, Sonos will re-shuffle the tracks in the playlist, but when I stop playing and, some time later, resume playing again, it just starts playing the same shuffled version of the playlist from the beginning again. My goal is to always have Sonos play a random selection from the playlist I have specified. The implementation of the feature is to just play the list, from the top, in a fixed order that has been randomized once (when I hit the shuffle button). 

But there’s more badness! In addition to the above behavior, the very first (unshuffled) track in the original playlist always seems to get “pinned” to the beginning of the shuffled playlist. When I restart playback of any given instance of the shuffled playlist, the very first track is always the same, unshuffled first song from the playlist! This is so frustrating, because the feeling I get when I start playing music is, “Bummer, I’ve heard this ONE track repeatedly recently because Sonos doesn’t understand what shuffle means”.

I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of my goal as a customer in the way the feature is implemented. My goal is for different randomized songs from the playlist to delight me whenever I just walk up to my Sonos and press the Play button - not the same randomized list of songs, but with the first one always being non-randomized. 

Does anyone else share this frustration? I’m curious if the feature exists this way because users requested it, (that would be surprising to me), or because Sonos never prioritized further refinements to what feels very much like a minimal first implementation of a much better experience.

I prefer it the way it is. But it works for me so that when I have paused and later press play again it resumes at the track it was paused on. Not from the very beginning as it seems to happen for you for some reason. If mine worked like that, I would definitely be frustrated, too. (I have noticed that if I stop and long enough time passes, the focus in the queue is not on the currently playing track but it is in the beginning so I need to scroll the queue to find the playing position. That to me is an error in the implementation.)

 

Not sure if you meant this but I also would not want it to work like this:

shuffle > playlist in random order > press pause > “time passes” > press play > playlist automatically re-shuffled.

For me that might easily play the same tracks again I have just heard recently. 
 

I keep the same queue on repeat (often shuffled but not always) for a longer time and just add new albums to it. So I prefer the “once-randomized” order. If I happened to want a re-shuffle, I’d press shuffle and then press shuffle again.

 

After being incredibly annoyed for years with the way Sonos handles shuffle/random play, I finally came up with a work around that works for me.

I used freeware Mp3tag to prepend a 5 digit random number to the beginning of every title of all my recorded songs (>39,000 songs). Here’s the Mp3tag Action:

$num($mod($rand(),50000),5) %title%

Then I simply play the songs ‘in order’. I keep track of the number of the song I’m on (in a file I typically keep open). When Sonos flakes out and I lose the queue, I just start playing in order again, and then scroll down the center window to get back to the place in the queue I’m at. I do all this on Windows, not on my phone.

The $rand function only goes to 32768, and some of the numbers end up being duped, and some are skipped (and it’s not truly random), but none of that matters, I’m getting the result I want. And I don’t think I’m getting the annoying ‘clumping’ that Sonos does, where within a 100 songs, I’d hear 3 or 4 tracks from the same album.

I’ve been doing this for a little over a week, and so far it’s working great. I’m very happy to know I won’t be hearing the same songs for at least a couple of years! (when I selected all the songs in Mp3tag, it said I had 117+ days of music...)

One thing I now remembered: over the summer I was using Amazon Music and I think then it happened a few times that the queue reset itself back to the first track after I hadn’t played for a few hours. 
 

I’ve since switched to YouTube Music and that has not occurred anymore in these couple of months. 
 

It might have been caused by the state of the app at the time and not related to Amazon Music.

@Tangman444 That is an incredibly clever solution! High five. Unfortunately, it won’t work for me, as I am primarily streaming lossless tracks in playlists on Apple Music, where renaming them is not possible.

(I used to maintain a local library of all of my music, but when Apple Music released everything with lossless quality, I stopped listening to and maintaining my local collection)

@kpr Thanks for sharing an update with your additional experience. I think you are onto something: Sonos is aggregating so many different media services, it’s probably very challenging to get them all to work the same way. Especially considering that each one can change at any moment. I don’t envy the developers who have to keep everything working!

One implementation of shuffle that works perfectly (for my way of listening) is an app called “Albums” on iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/albums-library-focused-player/id1469948986 This app enables shuffling by album - a feature that is surprisingly rare (I’ve never seen it in any other service, anyhow).

I often just use AirPlay to stream from this Albums app on my iPhone to my various Sonos components, but of course, this lacks the elegant simplicity of just walking up to a Sonos speaker and tapping the play button. And AirPlay has its share of annoying problems, too, but that’s probably a different topic entirely!

I’m currently sharing your frustration and trying to figure a way to fix it.  I’m a new Sonos owner and with speakers only a few months old, I had no choice but to download the S2 apps for our PC and iPad.  I don’t play music from streaming services -- just trying to play from my personal music library.  A lot of my music is in lossless formats from vinyl that I ripped and purposely formatted at high-quality levels, only to find out that Sonos doesn’t support them.  After reformatting a dogpile of stuff, Sonos wouldn’t allow me to reload the library -- finally sorted that problem out.

Now, I can hear the tracks Sonos wouldn’t play previously, but it’s shuffling all the tracks on whatever album I choose.  I’m a little old-school -- I want to hear the tracks in the order the artists intended, especially if it’s an album with a defined narrative (e.g., Tommy by The Who; or, imagine listening to a Beethoven symphony with the movements shuffled).  

Tangman444’s work-around is all well and good (if it works for my system), but it’s far too complicated -- one of the attractive features of Sonos was that it appeared SIMPLE.  Well, simple is great, provided it works.

Any thoughts?

Yes: If I were you, I would explore Roon: https://roon.app

I don’t use it, but if I was in your situation, they are the solution I would probably go with. 

Thanks so much for the recommendation.  I’ll check it out.

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings