I have the same issue that I’ve been feeling with for months, if not years. I just decided to look up to see if there was a fix. Apparently there’s nothing? I am a Plex pass user as well.
I thought I was the only one… playlists with 1,134 items keeps playing the same episodes… VERY frustrating, shuffle is VERY important, how can this still be after all this time? I had no idea everyone else was having an issue too, loads more people with the issue just not reporting I am sure… SOMEONE PLEASE FIX! Maybe make an option to play through the list without repeating a single episode until they’ve all been played / skipped??? something???
Maybe instead of acknowledging that it’s not random, we accept that it is random, it’s just random ONCE. After that, it uses the same randomized list. When shuffling a TV show with 9 seasons, I see the same episodes every night in the same order because it is not randomizing each time. Now, could this be the “super duper so random it doesn’t seem random” explanation - sure. I better start playing the lottery with the winning numbers from last week as well.
@jbmxr9 the solution I’ve used in the interim is to set all episodes of a show to unwatched, change the view to show only unwatched, then shuffle. It will shuffle only the unwatched episodes until they run out. I’ve yet to do testing to see if it’s the same order on each shuffle with that though.
+10
Same here; I have a music library of around 30.000 tracks on around 2000 artists and 40 playlists. In any combination (per playlist, per artist, on total collection, etc) shuffle play generates results that repeat/prefer certain songs a lot more above others.
The pattern that I seem to see is:
- recently added/edited songs have clearly higher preference above older songs
- already often played songs/artists seem to be preferred above less played songs/artists
It’s not really difficult to approach true randomness a bit better that this…
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Plex shuffle is one of the best features plex has. I am shocked Netflix, prime or hulu haven’t added this feature. I have a playlist of 10 sitcoms and it’s always the same episodes. Also if you random play the individual show you get the same episodes that show up when you random play the playlist.
I have noticed this over the years also. I’ll use random and tend to see EP that I have seen over and over again. It’s worth noting how it works; i know this cannot be some company trade secret 
+1 why has this not been fixed? I have a list of all of my simpsons episodes. For some reason I see the same 5 when I hit shuffle. I guess programming is hard.
I’ve also experienced this lack of randomness. I have a playlist of a bunch of movies I fall asleep to and, although whenever I hit the shuffle button (on my Apple TV), it’s not the same movie every time, it definitely feels like it’s picking from a very small selection of the actual playlist. I can’t confirm, but what I’ve noticed, is when I add more movies, the “small selection” that it chooses from seems to change. It leads me to believe there is some sort of seed generated when the playlist is created or modified and it uses that same seed to randomize things which is resulting in similar results each time. Just a guess. I would love some feedback from Plex on this.
I’m having the same problem. It’s not that the shows are always in the same sequence, but it looks like recently played or frequently played shows are weighted very heavily and come up the most often. This leads to the same shows being played over and over again. Since this thread is several years old, it looks like this will never be fixed. Shame, because shuffle would be a nice feature if it worked.
+1 this issue exists
If you have a TV show with 300 episodes, say, Law and Order
Hitting shuffle often produces the same list of episodes for the first 10+
I have Windows Server Plex, but observed the same on my linux box back in the day.
Plex Music Shuffle does not work it repeats songs on a shuffle picks same albums and even same tracks on a 20000 plus collection. It unacceptable and should be fixed
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+1 definitely NOT random ever
Same issue here. Plex, what can I provide you to help resolve this issue?
Same Issue. Thousands of episodes. Days of same videos replaying every time I “shuffle.” It’s got to be the worst algorithm ever written. Work on this not Tidal.
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I came here to find resolution, this is now years later. Unbelievable… I see the same episodes constantly, annoying as hell. I haven’t counted but its every season of 3 sitcoms… I. E Seinfeld, IASIP, the office.
OP same here wife and I cook to random/shuffle but now years later finding ourselves seeing the same ones. They’re still good but enough already! PLEX what’s the darn fix here or is there one in the works? This ain’t rocket science! 
likewise, and there still isn’t one and i basically have to rebuild all playlists every week to remove watched eps to stop us going insane,
on a playlist with ~1400 episodes, shuffle has managed to play the same 4 episodes of 4 of the shows within the first 10 or so eps 3 days in a row now. I can recite leslie knope going to washington and doug heffernan becoming vegetarian at this point. It also seems to have a real thing of playing either the very first or very last episode of any given show. It’s so repetitive my wife actually got angry at it and asked why we’re not using something better. I’m using a mac as a dedicated plex server and had the same problem before when using a shield TV. The play order does seem random, i’ll give it that, but what gets played categorically does not.
they once said here or reddit ‘it’s not exactly amateur hour’ about their implementation, but it really needs revisiting. i saw someone once ran a python script to test it and said they saw no patterns or repeat eps - and i just don’t know what to say to that. Every single time i press shuffle i get repeat eps - every single time. The only time i ever see some variation is after an update, where it seems to shift to a new selection to repeat from and we’re back at square one. The massive amount of shows that haven’t played once after years of shuffle is equally bizzarre as the fact the same series of 6 eps will crop up over and over. it feels like it only ever pulls from about 20% of the library with certain large episode count shows always being included.
The thing about apple saying that they had to manipulate shuffle to make it actually appear random gets brought up, and my question is if apple has made the statement that true random isn’t satisfactory, why doesn’t plex account for this the same way instead of just saying we’ve implemented it correctly so it must be fine? It doesn’t make sense as a defense.
as an aside, and i know this is going to sound insane, but plex has a weird habit of topically picking shows. The day Anthony Bourdain commit suicide guess who it played first on shuffle. On valentines day two days ago it played two valentines specials, same on thanks giving. it often plays movies back to back that have the same supporting actor in or are thematically similar. I’m not suggesting any of these are anything other than coincidence, but i do find it funny
it’s like it’s haunted and it’s just trying to annoy me and freak me out at the same time.
the day this is fixed i’ll buy a plex lifetime pass to support the devs ( and i would have sooner, i don’t feel using it for this long for free is fair, indie devs should be supported), but considering shuffle is literally the only feature i used beyond scan library and play i’m just not happy to make that step whilst other niche features like VR and news get implemented. i’m happy to be held to that statement, so feel free to @ me devs if you fix it and i’ll put my money where my mouth is.
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I’ve been using Plex for years and this has always been an issue for me. It’s a huge issue with the wife. I search every so often to see if there has been a solution or a setting I’m not finding. Sounds like nothing has changed here, too bad.
Like my previous peers, I also surf the web to find a solution from month to month. It would be nice to have this problem corrected once and for all. We are currently collecting data on this problem to show that we are still getting the same episodes, over and over.
is there a simple way to get logs of what’s being played on a daily/per shuffle basis?
I have noticed something, and that’s if you’re shuffling a single show, it does a reasonably good job. The problem seems more persistent on playlists made of a few or many shows. Again this week it’s been queuing up repeat episodes day after day, you can put money on certain eps playing
do any dev types know where to find the actual code responsible for shuffle? At this point i’m willing to just try and fix it myself or get one of the devs i know to have a look and not bother updating plex anymore, seems like it’s the only way it’s going to get sorted
