How to play an album in order on Apple Music
You pressed play on an album and got track 7, then track 2. Two things cause it, and both take a few seconds to fix.
Shuffle remembers its last setting
Shuffle in Apple Music isn’t a one-off choice for the album in front of you. It stays on until you turn it off. Shuffle a playlist on Monday, open an album on Tuesday, tap its first song, and you can get the album in shuffled order.
To check, open Now Playing and tap the queue button. At the top of the queue is the shuffle button (two crossed arrows). If it’s highlighted, shuffle is on: tap it once to turn it off, and the queue snaps back into the album’s running order.
Start from the album’s Play button
Every album page has two big buttons, Play and Shuffle. Play starts at track one in order. Shuffle does what it says. They sit side by side, and on a small screen it’s easy to hit the wrong one.
Pressing Play on the album page is the most reliable way to start a record. Tapping a song in the track list starts from that song, and how the rest plays depends on your shuffle setting. If you want the whole record, start with Play.
Make sure you’re playing the whole album
The other way an album comes out wrong is when you only have part of it.
If you once added a few songs from an album to your library, rather than the whole album, your library shows an album with just those songs. Press Play there and you hear three tracks out of twelve, in order, with gaps where the rest should be. It’s easy not to notice anything is missing.
The fix is to play from the full album in the Apple Music catalogue: search for it, open the album itself rather than your library copy, and add the whole thing if you want it in your library. Album-focused players handle this in different ways. Some quietly hide incomplete albums. Spinworthy imports only whole albums, and it counts and explains the ones you own a few songs of, so they don’t silently disappear.
Other things that scramble the order
- A playlist named after an album isn’t the album. Fan-made and editorial playlists often reorder tracks, drop interludes, or swap in a different version.
- Play Next and Play Later. Anything you add to the queue gets slotted in, and some of it can land between tracks of your album.
- Deluxe editions. The deluxe or anniversary version often adds bonus tracks, demos or live cuts, usually after the original closer. If you want the record as first released, pick the standard edition.
- Autoplay. After the last track, Apple Music carries on with similar songs unless you turn Autoplay off.
Why the order matters
Track order is one of the last creative decisions on a record, and one of the most argued over. The opener sets the tone, the closer is meant to feel like an ending, and on vinyl, each side was shaped as its own arc. Plenty of albums run songs straight into each other, so a shuffled order doesn’t just change the mood: it breaks songs in half.
If you’ve only ever heard an album on shuffle, try it once in order. It’s often a different record.
An album player without a shuffle button
Spinworthy is built around a single rule: the album is the unit. There’s no shuffle and no autoplay. You flip through your records, drop the needle, and the album plays in its running order, gapless, from the first track to the last. It needs an Apple Music subscription and is free on iPhone.
Put this into practice with Spinworthy
Spinworthy brings albums played in their running order, every time, with no shuffle button to catch you out right into your practice — so you can put this into action, not just read about it.