Flow repeats tracks


Userlevel 3
Is it normal to have several tracks repeated way too frequently when you are in the Flow feature?

101 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +14
It means that with 0 favourite tracks, Flow is unable to find music for you based on what you like, because it doesn't know what you like ;)
Please add some artists, albums, playlists and songs to your favourites so Flow can generate satisfying playlists for you :)

Unfortunately this doesn't help anyway . FLOW repeat songs too often . I have more than 600 songs on favorites .
Userlevel 4
Badge +1
Can we request that flow be coded to improve the songs it plays to change the frequency? The lack of diversity in the songs it plays is frustrating even though it plays songs I like it plays them too often
Userlevel 1

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.:nerd:
 

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

 

 

Userlevel 4
Badge +1
Is there any way to create some settings in flow on the frequency that tracks get played? I have some 500 favourite tracks yet Flow seems to play some very regularly and others seldom. It also then plays similar songs more often than ideal. If there was a way say to have Flow not repeat a song more than once in every X days or after Y songs. For example if it plays Smells like teen spirit (which is a great song) then it can't play it again until it has played 200 other tracks or some number that can be set? or can't play it again until 10 days have elapsed..... That would to me be a great feature and way to get new and varied music from my favourites as sometimes it does frustrate.....
Userlevel 2
Same. here. Deezer is very unimaginative when it comes to playing Flow tracks or recommended tracks. Coldplay, Interpol, Courtney Barnett, Acrtic Monkeys, over and over. Payoloa? Or Deezer needs some better algorithms.
Userlevel 2
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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.

Userlevel 1
I have the same problem, over 300 liked songs, several liked artists, lists and albums and there's still a song that gets played about 7 or 8 times in a couple of hours and there are songs that I haven't heard in a while. At this rythm I will remove it from my liked songs (as it happened before with other song, but I thought it was a problem of the song but it's not.)
Userlevel 2
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Hello,

I’m used to playing Deezer flow through Sonos.

I face two “issues”:

  1. It is not an infinite flow, as it always ends after something like a hundred songs (There are 2000 marked as favourite).
  1. It is a little annoying since flow seems to follow always the same sequence, sometimes adding new tracks.

 

Userlevel 2
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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.

Userlevel 2
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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.

Userlevel 1

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!

 

 

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. 

Userlevel 1

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. 😊

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

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.

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.

Userlevel 5
Badge +1
@e.velasquez.90 thanks for sending this!! will forward your case as well 🙂
Userlevel 4
Badge +1
any update in the algorithm? Would be great to be able to limit / adjust the frequency of repeated songs in flow - some of my favourite tracks would be played on flow 4-6 times a week others I haven't heard in months.….
Userlevel 4
Badge +1

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

Userlevel 4
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@Rudi Not available in the Bose soundtouch where I play 90% of my music

Userlevel 2
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Can we request that flow be coded to improve the songs it plays to change the frequency? The lack of diversity in the songs it plays is frustrating even though it plays songs I like it plays them too often


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.

There is a flow algorithm TEAM??

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

Userlevel 4
Badge +1

The Flow algorithm still needs work - with the my 2020 lists and stats recently presented (which is great) it shows that my ‘favourite’ track has been played 180 odd times this year so every second day.  I like the song but not that much and there are several similar.  I have over 600 tracks in favourites yet Flow doesn’t play them all regularly or anything close to that, if the full stats were available I’d guarantee some of my favourites are <5 plays through Flow in 12 months, some 180+ so there’s no real logic present.  I still think given Deezer clearly counts the number of times it plays a track it can’t be that hard to make it play each track less regularly or smooth the difference between most and lest played favourites?  You can dislike a song so it doesn’t play it again, why can’t you ‘it’s ok’ a track to play it occasionally or something but not daily or worse.  Or make it so over a month all tracks in favourites are played equally give or take 20% say?

 

This request is many months/years in this chat with the developers ‘looking into it’ but no improvement really.  Can it please be considered a little more earnestly?

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Hello,

I’m used to playing Deezer flow through Sonos.

I face two “issues”:

  1. It is not an infinite flow, as it always ends after something like a hundred songs (There are 2000 marked as favourite).
  1. It is a little annoying since flow seems to follow always the same sequence, sometimes adding new tracks.

Sorry to hear that.

You will receive good news, perhaps in 2021.

They are going to increase playlist limits. The well heard 2 000 limit anywhere Deezer will be much bigger. I can not guarantee unlimited however, that’s what their managers said here. I am now just repeating them, sorry. They do come with solution soon. I am waiting too, as Deezer is my life.

Premium.

Please do not forget to enjoy your finest life (and Deezer) as well!

Userlevel 7
Badge +3
Flow is really very very bad. I gave it a chance today after about two months and it played about an hour. Then I turned the phone off and on and the flow started playing the same songs again in the same order. Incredibly. I like daily mixes but flow is really a joke.
Userlevel 3
Badge +1

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? 

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.

 

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