Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat related: A month ago I migrated from Spotify to YTMusic (Youtube), and published the scripts I used to do it. People have kind of come out of the woodwork: reporting issues, starring the repo, asking questions, last night I found someone has written a GUI for it.

https://github.com/linsomniac/spotify_to_ytmusic

The biggest reason I ditched Spotify is that their shuffle play of playlists is laughably bad. I like listening to just a shuffle of my favorite music, but their player seems to "stick" on just a few of them. I ask it to shuffle a few thousand "liked" songs, during my shower every day, and I'll hear the same song 3 times in a week, for example.

There was a "bug" open in their support forum since 2017 that they replied "maybe we'll look at it eventually". It has hundreds of pages of replies. And they just laid off a significant portion of their workforce, so I figured it'd never get resolved. And for a company doing music playback, it just seems like they can't get one of the basics right.

Since going to YTMusic, I've been hearing songs from my playlists that I haven't heard in years.

They wrote an interesting blog some time back about how "random shuffle" isn't necessarily what people want, and how their algorithm works (https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... ). That was a decade ago, so maybe their approach has changed or that it does not perform well under certain conditions (like the one you mention). It works well for me on most playlists on the order of 10s.

I agree with you that it seems to work fine on playlists of less than 50 or 100 songs.

The problem seems to be that on larger playlists they will only use 50-100 of the tracks to shuffle through. Most times I'm listening to music I just want to put on a shuffle of all my favorites and listen. It's been that way since I got my first CD changer. Maybe that's a super unusual use case, but it's my primary one, and I get really tired of hearing the same songs repeatedly over a week. YMMV, my wife for example likes listening to the same songs every day.

As I mentioned above: I copied my Spotify playlists to YTMusic and am doing the same "shuffle my liked songs" and I'm literally hearing songs Spotify hasn't played for me in years. Usually the algorithm complaint in music players is that they are using random rather than shuffle, but even in that case I'd think that 2K songs over 2-3 years, I'd be hearing SOME of those songs that YTMusic is playing but Spotify is not. The cynic in me figured that they were prioritizing the songs by the ones that made them the most money, or from artists that paid for placement. But something about their shuffle is just totally off.

Yes, it looks like there is some artificial placement. This may be driven by malice (some sort of paid or more lucrative placement, like you said), but also by stupidity (algo prioritizing songs already in the client cache, to save some egress bandwidth perhaps?).

So I started clearing the Spotify client cache more often, and it looks to me there is more diversity, at least on the auto-generated "recommended songs" playlists. But still, no hard proof of this.

The "recommended songs" playlists seem to have more diversity, but also seem to be fairly short (they'll repeat in a couple hours it feels like; I rarely listen to them when I'm working because they'll start repeating, and I don't usually listen to music for a large fraction of the day, so I'm guessing 1-2 hours).

My best guess is that they are assuming no playlist is more than 50-100 songs, and are limiting the shuffle to that number, so that a shuffle doesn't consume too many resources (memory, database hits, CPU cycles). Maybe someone, possibly in the distant past had a large playlist that caused service problems. And because of that they clamped WAY down to prevent it.

Spotify product management has a history of not listening to customers, and thinking they know better, with lots of HN examples in threads about it

Another option is to use a tool that shuffles your playlist: https://spotifyshuffler.com

I wanted to like ytmusic, but their ios client is somehow worse that spotify. Main daily gripes are toasts (stop doing toasts on ios, never do toasts) hiding ui elements I want to touch and the app forgetting my queue every day or two

I love the fact that whatever song radio station I choose on spotify it always recommends me the same 30 songs. I'm starting to think they only have 50 songs in their whole library...

YTMusic is still a pale imitation of what Google Play Music used to be... but it's also still my main streaming service simply because most of my library transferred from GPM.

Agreed, I switched to Spotify when Google ditched Play Music, largely because my Google Home was terrible at using voice commands to play YTMusic "Liked Songs", I could never get it to work reliably. Then I found Spotify is just as bad at that use-case, but also worse at shuffle.

I had a friend that worked on Google Play, and he said it would have been much better if the labels hadn't gotten involved, in the form of demands made...

My primary complaint with YTMusic is that there isn't a way to "shuffle play", you have to start playing a playlist and then click "shuffle" and then click "next".

Oh my! I thought this weird behavior was just something _I_ experienced on Spotify. I'm always asking myself, "didn't I just hear this song?"

Nope. Here is the Spotify Forum thread I was mentioning: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Op...

A couple corrections: It's from 2020, not 2017, and it "only" has 114 pages of replies rather than 200.

Hah! I wrote something to go the other direction (YT->Spotify) because the dating apps only work with Spotify.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com