How to use smart shuffle

Smart shuffle is an advanced queue sorting criterion that allows you to keep your queue sorted by publication date while also avoiding as much as possible having clusters of episodes from a single subscription in your queue.

To use smart shuffle, place some episodes from different subscriptions in your queue, then tap … in the top bar, select Sort and finally Smart shuffle. Just like other sorting criteria, smart shuffle can be sorted in ascending or descending order.

How it works in detail

Let’s say you have 15 episodes in your queue: 1 from each of podcasts A, B and C, 2 from podcast D and 10 from podcast E. Smart shuffle first takes the podcast with the most episodes (E) and spreads out its episodes in the queue: EE_EE_E_E_EE_EE. It then takes the podcast with the second-most episodes (D) and spreads out those in the available slots: EE_EEDE_EDEE_EE. This continues until we end up with a queue that looks like this: EEBEEDECEDEEAEE.

Publication dates play a role both within podcasts (in our example, episodes from podcast E are sorted accordingly) and between podcasts (the episode from podcast B gets an earlier spot than the one from podcast A because the former is more recent).