Flow repeats tracks

It is the single most complained-about feature of Flow, and as a relatively new user I have seen many people complain about it here on this forum in many different threads.

Flow repeats some tracks way too often.  It also repeats entire playlists sometimes.  It also does not branch out enough in terms of genre or time period.

No we won’t roll out Flow 2.0 the way it was tested, but your feedback was used to create all new improvements on your Flow...

Hey there @maxkshaw, it does not seem to be an issue that a big amount of users are experiencing. 

Have you tried our track mixes or excluding wonderwall? 

I'm still on the trial. There's a lot I like about Deezer so far, but the repeated tracks and artists are infuriating! Seems like whatever I try to listen to ends up being an hour filled with the same few Johnny Cash and Beatles songs repeatedly. This is mostly on Android, but doesn't seem limited to that platform. In searching the community for this problem I'm seeing complaints of this from 5+ years ago with promises of changes to come and just wait, the devs have been informed. Yet here we are. As someone with a coding background I suspect there's no appetite to fix this because there's a significant reduction in BMG/ASCAP fees under certain conditions, something like that probably. Keeping users happy will pay off in the long run though and this issue may be a deal breaker for me personally.

Suggestion:

• put “exclude songs from flow for one day once they have been played” into preferences
• internally add a tag to each track that says “played in flow at timestamp xyz”
• check for that timestamp whenever the next song is rolled out for flow and skip it if timestamp is younger than 24 hours
• job done

Really … it’s not 2 lines of codes, it’s probably about 4 lines plus some UI change. No need for “data scientists”, this request is quite straight forward.

I had too many repetitions today … plus, the same couple of songs keep coming up everytime I start flow NEW. There is something serisouly broken in that system and you definitely do NOT need data scientists to figure that out. 

I’m glad this is finally being recognised. It’s crazy that the devs haven’t done anything about it yet. Perhaps they don’t personally use Deezer for their music needs?

3 years.. still no fix, c’mon guys.

The fixes are here, we’ve been telling them to you for years, its not rocket science guys, we do coding, we KNOW how complicated this is and SERIOUSLY does not take 1 programmer more than maybe a day to code and test it, and if it does you need better programmers or there’s something seriously wrong with your codebase…

We understand a full blown super nice solution takes months of planning, checking with multiple  teams, lots of approvals, the  GUI team needs to OK every pixel just how they like it OR ELSE!, code it properly onto the engine etc, that we get but were not asking for that ATM,

We know you guys have other code issues and priorities on the pipeline and you cannot reroute resources to this without causing a major problem to your schedule.

What we are asking is not a large resources commitment, just a small “hotfix” in the meantime, while you get, someday, time to do it right, and again we understand it takes time, even to do this, but if in 3 years you havent done it then lets just all accept its just never going to get done, its not a priority, period.

If you want to fix it /please us just do this:

The quickest/simplest solution is just as we’ve been saying forever.

Add an option to the app settings page that allows us to set the minimum delay before listening to the same song again, just a simple/basic slide button that says ENABLE/DISABLE (you already have tons of those there, copy paste the code), then a text box beside it that says:

Prevent the same song from playing again for XX minutes, hours,  or days with a dropdown to select the time scale.

Then add a “last played” tag field to the songs data/labels in your customers flow database, the last played data will always be populated by the last time the track was played, immediately after also zero hard.

Nothing in those 2 things should be overly complicated, break anything or time consuming to code.

Then when the customer starts listening to the flow algorithm, let the flow thing do its thing as it does now, change nothing there, but AFTER the part where the algorithm decides what song is going to play next but BEFORE the song is played, add a code check as follows:

READ USER_LASTPLAYED_DELAY variable, if variable exists(the option is enabled), read value.

READ SONG_LASTPLAYED_TIME variable from the customers flow database, IF SONG_LASTPLAYED_TIME is lesser or equal to CURRENT_TIME minus USER_LASTPLAYED_DELAY, then SKIP TRACK, ELSE do nothing and play already selected for next playback track.

And that’s it that’s all you need to do.

That will make sure we wont listen to the EXACT same tracks over and over again, and you don’t need to change or mod anything in the flow algorithm or the way the software works, or anything complicated to make this fix, you are just essentially clicking the skip button for us, saving us the hassle.

With this change you can even add a “songs_auto_skipped” flag, where every time a song gets auto skipped using this method, a counter gets added to the songs_auto_skipped variable of the users flow database, then your engineers can go back and check how many times a users flow skips tracks due to repeat, if you see users with hundreds or thousands of counters on their flow’s autoskip variable , then you can quickly single those anomalies out and see  why these users get so many repeats, and pass these on over to the engineering department so they can take a better look at what’s going on and do a proper fix… someday.

As you can see the  solution is not that complex, and you would even get an awesome data metric in the process to improve your flow algorithm a lot more.

All you need to do now is grab your best guy that’s working on something else, sit him down for a minute, tell him you need him to do some overtime over the weekend, give him near unlimited access to the company’s ubereats/doordash paid account, offer him a handsomely priced overtime bonus, and tell him in addition to what hes doing,  you need this done, tested and working by Monday, and he will get it done.

You will get all of us off your backs, and make all of us happy in the process, not to mention keeping our subscriptions “flow”ing (pun intended).

I Hope this helps drive the point across we’ve been telling you guys for years, stop procrastinating, its not that complicated, get it done.

Cheers!

Guys, are you crazy? This thread is 3 years old. This is still an ongoing issue. Do you know how many people are listening the flow? I don't know, but I think a lot of people do. This problem is corrected by two lines of code. Programmers know this. There is 2 option here: either this problem is not brought to them, or they simply do not want to solve it.

Hey @maxkshaw I don’t have a clue about coding and developing so I am not sure if the fix involves juts a couple on lines of code.
However, if you are experiencing this problem on a daily basis, please let me know and I can contact our devs in order to check your Flow on their side to make sure what’s going on.
Thanks and apologies for any inconvenience.

We're aware of some of its limitations @alice07 great input from you! Our devs really appreciate this kind of feedback so that we know exactly how it feels with real examples 

In my opinion flow learns in a perverse way. 
Each time you start the flow, you listen some tracks among your favourites or playlist. These tracks are marked as listened and liked by the engine, so next time they are proposed again and double-marked as listened, and so on. In a few you will have a very short list of tracks that flow thinks you like most of all, and it will propose those every time, with no exit.

It's a pleasure. Many thanks Rudi. I'm constantly working on SkipTracks to make it better. 🎵

Have a great day everyone. 😊