iTunes has a Skip when Shuffling tag, which lets you mark tracks so that when you shuffle your music, they don’t come up. This is essential if you have spoken word tracks in your iTunes library, but I also use it for classical music, which should not be listened to when shuffled.
For more than a year – since the release of iOS 9 – this feature has not worked on iOS. I’d get my Monty Python album tracks, my Shakespeare tracks, and more when shuffling my music. Now, with iOS 10.2, it seems to be fixed. Following a comment from a reader, I shuffled music on my iPhone, and skipped through about a hundred tracks, and none of my spoken word recordings came up.
I’m glad this is fixed, but I’m appalled that it took Apple more than a year to correct it. I filed a bug report very early on, and it was closed as a duplicate, so Apple was well aware of this issue. I think it’s a shame that they didn’t think it was a priority. I can’t imagine that this bug was hard to fix, but given Apple’s track record with bugs in their software lately, it may have been more complicated than one might imagine.