Flow repeats tracks

any update on this algorithm for flow - seemed to be better but has again in recent days got it’s old groove back playing the same dozen or two songs from my liked list of 600+ favourite tracks.  Surely it’s not that hard and this blog is a year old now….. pretty please

Hey @gdr 

Thank you for your patience. Have you tried your Discovery weekly Flow card? By liking more songs in there, you'll be telling the algo you want more discovery in your Flow, for example.

@Rudi Not available in the Bose soundtouch where I play 90% of my music

Thanks for reporting it here in this topic too, @gdr we'll pass it on

A year on and Flow is just the same; I can’t listed to the same three Joni Mitchell tracks every day! Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to randomize the top 20 or 30 tracks of each artist (depending on their career output). I use shuffle instead but even that isn’t very random and it can’t be access via Alexa on Echo devices. I think Deezer really needs to up its game here.

I have the Bose SoundTouch app and it’s a piece of junk. It displays only 25 albums per artist, you can’t sort artists, you can’t move forward or backward in a track, etc, etc. Absolute rubbish. Bose lets itself down mightily with its software; the hardware sounds great but I think they’ll die if they don’t get their apps sorted out and soon.

Surely if I have an artist/album is my catalog Flow can just work from that. I wouldn’t have the artist/album if I didn’t like them. Having to “favourite” them as well is a bit ridiculous.

Re Flow: I have read tips and tricks . And found nothing new. I have added 100s of tracks to Favs - so many that I discovered the limit is 1000!

yet Flow very rarely samples these tracks. The usual pattern is:

1. Plays 3 or 4 tracks over and over and over and ruins them for me
2. 80% is discovery 
3. rarely if ever does it sample from my fav.
4. lets say I have Cake or Howard Jones as Favs. I have red hearted both the artist and lots of tracks by those artists. Flow continues to choose the same one or two tracks by those artists. Thereby ruining those songs for me

Hi @jugehu thank you for explaining a bit further. So basically FLOW plays artists you like but repeats the same tracks over and over again. I forwarded this as feedback to our Flow algorithm team and hope they can change this for you 

If you prefer less discovery, you could simply click on Shuffle my Music to play your entire music library. If you prefer more discovery, try Discovery https://www.deezer.com/en/smarttracklist/discovery 

and New releases https://www.deezer.com/en/channels/new 

If you prefer less discovery, you could simply click on Shuffle my Music to play your entire music library.

Not true, Shuffle is very restricted/narrow in the tracks it plays as well.

Deezer, why is this so hard?? Randomize, checking for repeated tracks BY NAME (so you don’t get three tracks repeated from the album, Best of … and live, for example). Done. I have no idea how you’ve gone about it but it sure doesn’t work very well.

There is a flow algorithm TEAM??

what the hell have they been doing? As Steve C says - how hard can it be?

Hello @Steve C and @jugehu, thank you for your feedback, we’ll make sure to let them know your thoughts on the shuffle mode, it’s true it needs improvements.

Have a nice day

In my opinion, a good Shuffle should work like this:

1. Randomly select tracks from my ENTIRE LIBRARY, BUT
2. Do not repeat tracks by the same artist BY NAME for at least a day, preferably longer*, AND
3. Possibly do not play tracks shorter than 15s as these are likely not “real” tracks, eg preludes to tracks.

Yes, you could add fancy options such as play only popular tracks, or only from tagged artists or albums.

* Not just the album/track number as this can mean you get, say, Bohemian Rhapsody from a multitude of different releases: original album, live albums, best ofs, etc, etc. I realize that this requires you to potentially track more data but you can do this smartly by tagging tracks with the same name by the same artist with the an ID.

Hello @Steve C, that would be indeed pretty clever to do so. However like you said, option 2 is a bit complicated as we work using track, album and artist IDs and not the names, so we would have to set up a whole tag system which we would need to fill for the millions of tracks available on the Deezer catalogue  3. is a very good idea as well, totally agree on that one.

Cheers!

… we would have to set up a whole tag system ...

Not really; you could simply use a hash of the artist + album + track name. It wouldn’t need to be exact so you could simply save a sub-string of hash. 16 characters should give you plenty of immunity from repeats.

That's a good point and we'll be passing it on @Steve C - your feedback is much appreciated, thank you 

Ok, here’s what you get for Canned Heat: In the top 13 tracks, On The Road Again is there FOUR TIMES and Going Up The Country THREE TIMES:

This virtually makes listening like this, er, unlistenable unless you’re willing to jump in and skip tracks all the time.

I completely agree @Steve C that Flow doesn't look good at all. Have you tried clearing the app's cache or if on web, cache and cookies? 

How would that help, @Rudi? The stats aren’t coming from my own machine or account, they community-based, right?

Hi @Steve C 

Clearing the app's cache tends to help with how the information store in your device interacts with our side. It's a suggestion, I've forwarded your details to our devs regardless - just trying to speed things up 

Really tired of this ‘feature’ . Been using Deezer for a year now, and its never been solved. Tracks that I heard months ago, and in faves, keep repeating 50%+ of time (maybe more) .  Seems like Deezer PM/dev  team cannot handle it.

Today what frustrated me the most, I clicked ‘Change Mood’,  and like got dozen of same recent tracks.

*that I’ve been hearing for months, keep repeating.   50%+ of the Flow time

Hi there @anon1252 

Thanks for reporting and for your patience. We're looking into this, comments passed to our devs 

In the meantime, please follow the tips here 

time for an update on this issue - Flow still has it’s favourite songs which are sometimes based on my favourites but often not…..  the algorithm just needs a counter added or timestamp so it knows what it has played recently and chooses from some of the other hundreds of songs I like, or hundreds of songs like that but not always the same tens of songs

Sure @gdr I've been working on a few users' reports on Flow recently, so our devs will continue to work on this