Problem! - Reaction! - Solution!

Try out my brand new app, called SkipTracks, that I have just released on Google Play. Sorry, there is no Apple version.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ian.symonds.skiptracks

I hope that SkipTracks helps with these problems. If you would like me to add new features to the app, or even if you find something that doesn't work on SkipTracks please don't hesitate to contact me directly, via the email link on the Google play store.

Ian Symonds

Developer of SkipTracks

Hi there @Ian.S 

Thanks for sharing your development work with our community, appreciated.

Have you also check our career openings?

https://www.deezerjobs.com/en/

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

Have a great day everyone.

Sorry to hear that FLOW repeating tracks.

FLOW. may be best in the business to recommend tracks, but it surely does not work for everyone. Not even for me all the time. If you get unrelated tracks, skip or ban them as soon as possible.

FLOW is learning and the best of all they seem to work on improving FLOW feature-wide.

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.

Your feedback is valuable, as they are working to improve in exactly this way as we speak.

Please stay for a while to see it yourself.

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 

Hey @Rudi , is there any update on this? It's crazy that this is still a problem. It should be really easy to fix. One, maybe two, lines of code.

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.

Hi @Jaime. 

Yes, please contact the dev team. This problem has been going for as long as I’ve been using Deezer (since early 2020). This problem has been raised multiple times by various members of this community.

Frankly, I can’t believe it hasn’t been fixed already. It’s embarrassing.

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.

Exactly. It would be so simple to fix...

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!

Thanks for your feedback @XionicFire @Ivan16 @maxkshaw. Many users want less repetition in the flow and we need absolutely to address that. 
I have forwarded your message to our developers and they mentioned that it is a bit more complicated than a 2 lines of code fix as it has an impact in the interface and also implies mobile development. Also, flow is considered to be a simple button.
Devs are fully aware of the problem and this is a priority now. We have a dedicated datscientist team that has been working on that precise problem for several weeks, since the release of the new flow version in December.
They have collected first some data to previously analyse when a repeated track gets on the nerve of our users.
AB test is the next step, and once I have news on any fix or implementation I will let you know.
Thanks for your patience and all your feedback. It is very much appreciated it.
 

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?

Hi, thanks for responding and acknowledging the issue

we realize its not LITERALLY 2 lines of code however what we are trying to say is it should be something you can code in a relatively simple manner and should most certainly not take more than a few days, for now you can beta test the feature with us your guinea pigs i mean PC users, and if all is well push it later to mobile.

Your entire PC client is coded using electron, its a SUPER simple interface to code and modify vs say be it done in C++ that’s why were saying to not try to make it super nice just patch it for now, worry about fixing it fine later.

After the 17th repeat of the same song in the past 8 hours while working it breaks my concentration and  I almost wanted to downvote it so i wouldn’t have to hear it again but that would mess up my flow algorithm so i clicked skip and just accepted it… until it came up again….

It’s like working at walmart in the 2010's during christmass, after 2 weeks of hearing the same songs over and over you hear it again at home and want to kill someone.

I was literally fed up to the point where i was going to just start trying out other services, but id figure id check the forums first to see if I'm alone on this, its been a while since i’ve tried them and they may have fixed the same issue that brought me here, google and pandora had this same problem, same tracks over and over, that's why i came over, flow had that same problem but at least it had a lot more tracks so it was worth it but its reaching a limit.

Oh and PS, i had a problem where your electron interface kept blurring the fonts constantly, making my head hurt, its not a fault in Deezer itself but on the electron engine you use, it keeps trying to antialias the Deezer interface like if it was a video, causing the fonts to “degenerate” and blurr slowly over time, since thankfully Deezer was always just minimized it wasn't an overly annoying issue unless i was trying to work on my playlists, but things like discord and Franz were really killing me, turns out starting Deezer with the command line “Deezer.exe -disable-gpu” fixes the font blur by disabling GPU acceleration (and thus, the anti alias that comes with it).

Telling you this in case you ve run into this problem with other users or want to tell ur devs to disable gpu acceleration for the Deezer app as an option in the settings page, its a music app so blurry fonts are not a deal breaker after all but just letting you know of that problem since we have you here haha.

Ill wait for the new flow and see if that fixes the issues

Again thanks for the response and attention

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 have repetitive playlists all the time. I have more than a few favs in my list, but the music is literally the same all the time. Same songs, same artists… I’ve been using Deezer for a couple of years and this behavior is ongoing.

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.

Hi @Yula, is there any update on this? I’ve just listened to f***ing Wonderwall 5 times in 3 days.

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? 

Hi Yula, has Flow 2.0 been rolled out to Android users or not? I was part of the 2.0 trial, so I would expect to be informed when the feature goes live.

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...

Thanks, so is there any update on the improved Flow? Listening to Flow on my Android is often a painful experience. Interestingly, I have a new feature on my desktop app and this seems to be working well (few repetitions).

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.