iOS 9 Music App Ignoring “Skip When Shuffling” Tag on Tracks Synced from iTunes

iTunes has a setting that lets you exclude certain tracks from shuffle mode. I use this for classical music and spoken work tracks that I don’t want to hear when I shuffle songs on my iPhone, or in iTunes. To set a track to not shuffle, select one or more tracks, press Command-I, and then click Options. Check Skip When Shuffling.

Skip when shuffling

Unfortunately, this isn’t working reliably any more. I started noticing this problem when the Music app was refreshed in iOS 8.4. But with the release of iOS 9, I see it a lot more; many of my classical or spoken word tracks come up in shuffle mode on my iPhone. Here’s on example. I just started shuffling songs on my iPhone, and you can see that, in the Up Next lest, the next track is from a Monty Python album, and the sixth track in the list is a classical track. Both of these are set to Skip When Shuffling.

Up next list

This is annoying. When I listen in shuffle mode, I’d rather not have to skip over a lot of tracks. This is clearly a bug, and I hope it will be fixed soon.

Dear reader, are you seeing this too?