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.
