You open YouTube, search for your favorite song, enable autoplay, and switch to the next tab to continue working while listening to music.
After two or three songs, you hear the first song you played, and afterward, it gets to a loop of the first 2 or 3 songs you played.
So, how do you take YouTube off repeat?
Well, the problem seems to have started in 2018, but since then it hasn’t been fixed despite a moderator on Google forums promising users that it had been fixed.
However, there are some fixes that you apply in the meantime to prevent YouTube from playing the same songs on a loop.
Before I list the fixes, here are a couple of things that might be causing YouTube to repeat songs:
- Autoplay could be sticking with your most played songs based on your watch history
- An issue with the YouTube annotations feature
- A plugin that might be preventing ads from loading
Now, let’s dive into the solutions:
Clear your watch history
The YouTube autoplay feature isn’t about random songs –rather it tries to create a playlist based on your previously watched videos. The problem is that it sticks with 2 or 3 of your most played songs.
Therefore, you need to clear your watch history for the playlist to be selected randomly:
To clear your watch history on YouTube:
- Open YouTube on your computer browser
- On the left side of your screen, select History
- Choose Watch History on the right side
- Click Clear All Watch History on the bottom right side
This should get rid of the YouTube cache and allow playlists to be random.
Disable annotations
Annotations can help you to select the next video to watch. However, the feature might also be responsible for repeating the same songs on YouTube.
To disable it:
- Open any video
- Click the Gear icon
- Turn Annotations off
- Refresh YouTube
Open YouTube on a new window
- Click the three dots on the right side of your browser then click Open a New Window. Alternatively, press Ctrl + N.
- Open YouTube and play your songs
While this method works, sometimes it can only work when YouTube is the view.
So, you’re better off minimizing it so that it shares your workspace with whatever you are doing or opening it on a secondary screen.
Open YouTube in a different browser
Switching to a different browser can also stop videos from looping on YouTube.
Since this error mostly occurs on Chrome, if you have Firefox, Opera, or any other browser installed on your PC or Mac, use it to stream YouTube videos.
Log out of your YouTube account
You might also want to log out of your YouTube account to prevent the autoplay software from using previously stored information.
To do this:
- Click your profile icon on the top-right corner of the YouTube page
- Click Sign Out
- Follow the prompts to log out
- Reopen YouTube and try streaming songs
Turn off Adblock
Disable any extension that prevents ads from loading when watching YouTube videos. To do this, highlight an extension icon on your Chrome browser and select Remove from Chrome.
Reopen YouTube and try streaming again.
Clear browser cache
- Click the three horizontal dots on the upper right corner of Google Chrome to open the menu
- Select More Tools
- Select Delete Browser Data
- Choose the duration you’d wish to delete the data
- Click the checkbox next to Images and Files in Cache
- Click Delete Browser Data and wait for it to complete
Discover new music!
If you’ve been subjected to listening to YouTube on repeat for the last few days or even months, I hope this guide has been helpful to you.
If the videos still keep looping or you’ve found a better way to shuffle the YouTube playlist, let us know!
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