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Comment by Twirrim | Hacker News Reader

I'm increasingly frustrated with their response to Community Ideas and feature requests.

Here's a really dumb, simple one: They won't allow you to filter out explicit songs. Even though they already have the metadata indicating a song has explicit lyrics. Lots of customers have asked for it. It has been voted highly on "Community Idea". Still no progress multiple years later.

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Spotify's UI and their response to features is the worst thing ever. I really wish Play Music or whatever started integrating Youtube video music as well, and that it actually stopped skipping during play so I could make the switch.

Like I can't re-size columns anymore. Used to be able to do this. Now it's gone. It's super obnoxious for playlists that have classical music in them because oftentimes the piece gets cut off.

Then there are SO many bugs in the UI. I had a super annoying one a few weeks ago where I have shuffle on, and if I manually picked a song to play, that would turn shuffle off. So any time I wanted to hear a specific song in my 300+ song playlist, I had to turn shuffle on again.

Oh and ANOTHER super obnoxious bug/feature: after a while, downloaded playlists just aren't downloaded anymore. This is extra annoying for flights because I KNOW I have playlists set to download, I KNOW they finished downloading, I KNOW they were downloaded and playable for a few weeks, but still every damn time I get on the plane, after a few weeks of the playlist being downloaded, the files are gone. And I'm stuck on the plane in offline mode with no music to listen to. Play music doesn't have this issue. In fact, I don't have to tell it to download anything. Last weekend on my flight to LA, Play Music had cached/downloaded the two playlists I use the most.

Spotify is such garbage. I hate it so much.

Is this with uploaded music? If so, it could be an issue with regular music syncing deleting or having them become unavailable. That feature is super finicky and iffy and I only ever do manual syncs to mostly avoid it.

Another fun classical music bug is when you try to share those songs in Discord and they break the stream, probably because the titles are too long.

Nope, it's not with uploaded music. I don't upload any music to Spotify because it (as far as I know) doesn't sync across devices. This is the issue I'm seeing: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Downloaded-songs-an...

I believe it's something with Android and restarting the device. It'll happen on my Android tablet, too.

It's a little known feature where you can get Spotify to sync local files across devices by putting both devices on the same wi-fi network. It's a pain, though, and it sometimes fails in the ways I'm talking about (I still use the feature anyway).

I've been a paying Spotify subscriber since 2010. Slowly I've grown dissatisfied with their service.

They killed the instant notifications of new album releases of bands that you follow. They replaced it with a weekly 'Release Radar' that comprises a selection of new music catered to your taste. It seems that the feature has a bias towards certain artists. I listened to Martin Garrix a couple of times years ago and he seems to pop up every few weeks in my 'Release Radar' even though all I really listen to these days is improvised jazz. It doesn't make sense and it isn't in my best interest. Perhaps there is an ulterior financial motive behind 'Release Radar' where record companies can bid for a place in that list, but I'm not sure. What I really want is to get a notification the minute my favorite artists release an album. Surely this shouldn't be too much asked in this day and age.

Until recently you could use search operators like year:1968 genre:jazz and now it's gone. I really like it when you can query repositories of data (music, in the case of Spotify) as a database.

These things really irk me and I'd love to migrate to a (legal) service that does this properly and is relatively free of "smart algorithms", and I wouldn't mind paying $50 a month or maybe more for it.

Try the combination of Roon[1] and Tidal[2]. It is expensive but the user experience is unrivaled.

[1] https://roonlabs.com [2] https://tidal.com

>I really wish Play Music or whatever started integrating Youtube video music as well

Oh boy! I'm so excited to tell you that YouTube Premium is the membership for you!

I just got the free trial a few weeks ago when it launched in Canada and it is FANTASTIC.

Plus, I just discovered the YouTube music app and it is AMAZING.

Not only can you download all the YouTube music you want offline, but you can easily download full videos -- right now I have a ton of Tableau and Excel tutorials to work through on my commute!

Hope I don't come off as a shill, but given that I commute 1-3 hours each way everyday, YouTube is a huge step up from torrents.

I’m pretty excited too, but all I’m getting is the “Coming to your country soon” type deal. It really boggles the mind why they can’t make it available sooner.

Regarding the shuffle bug: it's, uh, not a bug. They changed it to be like that in all the interfaces I've used. :(

You know what also dumb? If you have an explicit song in a playlist and then that song becomes un-available due to some licensing deal from the original licenser but is still available (in explicit and explicit) form another licenser sometimes your explicit song will get swapped for the clean version. It's incredibly jarring and at least the last time I dealt with the issue it was really hard to find the explicit song from the mobile app to fix my playlist and had to do it on the desktop.

The inability to filter explicit songs out is maddening! And it's a glaring omission to anyone with young children. I have seen it skip from a My Little Pony song to an explicit Patton Oswalt standup bit (perhaps because he voiced a character once... I have no clue) while my daughter was listening.

Another annoying one is how you can choose an exact song to play on tablet or on PS4, but not from your phone - you can only shuffle play there. Try explaining that to a 5 year old.

The search tab allows you choose any song you want on iOS- what platform doesn’t let you play a particular song?

Agree on the explicit filter though. Seems like such an auto-include for things like parents or storefront playlists

That's a bug that's been around for AGES that they still haven't patched. I hate it.

If you force kill the app and reopen it, suddenly you can choose songs(usually). Then after a while, suddenly you can't. It took me months to figure out what was going on because i'd have another phone in my house right there that could do it, then that wouldn't be able to either suddenly...

I’m not sure about letting you filter but they have a toggle to hide explicit songs in settings -> explicit content (on iOS at least)

No service seems to handle this well. I mostly want the opposite: show only uncensored versions in searches and playlists, but it would also be nice to globally toggle to clean versions if I’m hanging out with a child. It’s frustrating and cluttering to see both versions in the catalogue as if they are separate releases.

The problem is also impacted by how those songs get onto the platform. Apparently, music companies literally just upload the music files, correct metadata or not

Here's one better: I want to filter out an artist from ever appearing in my playlists. I would love to block artists from my music universe.

> Even though they already have the metadata indicating a song has explicit lyrics.

Heh, I talked to someone from a large tech company about this who was working with this data, and in his opinion the "explicit" metadata that record labels provided wasn't very good.

Actually, you can filter out explicit songs, but the option is only visible in the mobile app (I have Android). Once you turn it on, it also works on the desktop client signed in to the same account.

Also, on iOS you can swipe right on a song to queue it, but can't do it on android! Also a popular community idea

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