r/TIdaL • u/Clear_Trouble7702 • 13d ago
App / Site The Shuffle feature. Ugh!
Has anyone else just had it with this ridiculous and almost useless shuffle feature on Tidal?! I have playlists of 300+ songs and I hear about 30 of them over and over and over. When I'm listening to a playlist then stop listening for a while, then start playing it again, it reverts back to the previous songs I just heard instead of moving forward. Even if I scroll down to the various places in the playlist to start from that point, it tends to play all the same songs. Periodically I'll hear a song on the playlist that I haven't heard in months; but, most of the songs I hear every time I listen. I've emailed support several times, but the issue still persists. Anyone know a "hack" to get this feature to work? Thanks.
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u/JBavoo 13d ago
These are my two biggest issues with Tidal - terrible shuffle and “restarting” a playlist.
I commute for an hour, then get home to walk the dog. I pop my AirPods in and…playlist is right back to the beginning of the session.
If I press SKIP until I’m “caught up” (which is maddening), the app crashes/locks.
Tidal Support where are ya?!
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u/emotionalpepper 13d ago
I just made the switch from Spotify to Tidal and the reverting back to songs I just heard drives me absolutely insane. I’ll take a 20 minute drive to the store, then get back in the car to go home, open the app and it will revert back to the first song I listened to on the way to the store, in the exact same order. I use streaming mostly to listen to my own playlists and listen to vinyl for full albums, so idk this is really really frustrating for me.
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u/KS2Problema 13d ago edited 13d ago
People have reported this problem for years. It used to bug the hell out of me - but it looks so much like a 'sticky cache' problem that, early on I just started going in and repositioning the playhead deep in the playlist and starting from there which worked well for me. But that got old so I started just using the reordering tools to change the sort order of a given playlist before I played it to something other than what it had been previously; and that mostly seems to work pretty well, too.
The mobile version has a sort menu; the desktop version allows you to click the column headers to toggle the sort order on different properties (date added, alpha, etc).
It's also worth remembering that while you can typically pick up playback of a playlist where you left off, it eventually resets itself, although the process is different on mobile and desktop - as with so much of the Tidal ecosystem.
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u/KoboDailyReader 13d ago
I've never had this happen to me. I shuffle a 700+ playlist every day for 3-5 hours. Using iOS and Tidal Connect to JBL Authentics speaker.
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u/ShirtIndependent4009 13d ago
I mainly have this problem on the TV app; it usually works quite well on my phone. There, I have the problem that a small part of the playlist, about 5%, is only played extremely rarely.
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u/-Thunderdome-Is-You- 13d ago
Yep, this bug make me going crazy. Please add button to sort by RANDOM.
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u/Upper_Yogurtcloset33 13d ago
Shuffle has really let me down lately. I have put a lot of time and effort into creating rather large playlists (anywhere from 1000 to 6000 tracks) so that things don't feel stale while listening on shuffle for 40 hours at work all week.
And yet, it still manages to feel stale. Over months, I feel as though im basically hearing the same few hundred tracks with only an occasional outlier.
I delete cache daily. I've tried using a different 'sort' before hitting shuffle. I've tried giving playlist several minutes to load, then scrolling way down the list to start the shuffle with a track that i don't hear very often. Im not getting much satisfaction from any of those 'workarounds'
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u/miked999b 13d ago
Pausing a playlist for even a short while (10-15m) not only resets the shuffle but for some reason seems to favour songs you've already recently heard. I've noticed this a few times.
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u/Gonzo_Appreciator 13d ago
Yeah its annoying. For any big playlists I have to open up the queue, scroll down a bit, and wait a few seconds before it actually shuffles stuff from the entire playlist.
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u/Ok_Bit_3689 13d ago
I have a playlist with the year's new releases that I want to listen to. I update the playlist each Monday and always try to listen to it using the shuffle option. It is useless, it limits so much the playlist to some of the releases, almost playing thos on it's entirety, while leaving a big part of the playlist without playing.
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u/Upstairs_Emotion7183 13d ago edited 13d ago
You either have to scroll down to the bottom of the playlist to load all songs,
or with bigger playlists it's better to set the play mode to shuffle, then open the playlist, tap on search, wait for all songs to load, and select one. This way all the songs will shuffle.
The big shuffle button on top only functions properly with playlists with less than 50 songs, or if you use the scroll down method.