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Comment by amethyst | Hacker News Reader

At this point, I'd be willing to pay for a Spotify client that works exactly the same, but just ignores the existence of podcasts entirely. I use a dedicated podcast client when I want to listen to podcasts, and they keep shoving them in my face and taking up precious UI real estate everywhere.

But any client without support for Spotify Connect might as well be dead to me. Controlling my wifi speakers from my phone, or playing music on my desktop Mac from my laptop or gaming PC is critical functionality at this point.

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Check out spicetify cli[0]! It patches the Spotify (desktop) client and makes it better. It also adds support for extensions, one of which[1] disables the podcast features. I haven't used the extension so I'm not sure how well it works.

Heads up though, the original developer is MIA at the moment and the latest few versions of the client are incompatible. There's an effort by someone to fix the issues and there are other maintainers who mostly just seem to address PRs. Personally I just downgraded the client and it works perfectly.

[0] https://github.com/khanhas/spicetify-cli

[1] https://github.com/3raxton/spicetify-custom-apps-and-extensi...

I'd be willing to pay for a Spotify client that allows you to select your audio output device. And yet here we are, 10 years later...

Spotify is a marketing platform first and an audio player second.

What platform do you mean? The iOS app lets me select output device. It’s a little icon next to play/pause, kind of half computer screen half bookshelf speaker (monitor/monitor :)

I think I remember seeing this on desktop too but at that point why not use the OS sound mixer?

Android works pretty much the same way. I'm usually listening on my PC, but I don't try to control other devices from there so I can't remember if it's possible there.

this doesn't speak to that point but while we're talking android, the Spotify lite client is so nice for me and my 6 year old phone

No, the app lets you select what system you're going to listen to Spotify on, not what audio device to use on your system.

Sometimes I just want music through my speakers while I have something else piping into my headset. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re on Windows, you can define audio input and output devices on a per app basis through Windows’ settings. Handy for any app that doesn’t support such configuration (though Spotify obviously should.)

It works similar on Linux with pipewire/alsa/pulse, there are several guis for such.

TIL, thanks!

They make it easy to play to any Bluetooth device or headphones. Covers my use case, but I can see it being annoying if it doesn’t support your setup.

On iphone I can’t seem to actually choose the bluetooth device to play to from the app itself. iOS limitation?

Click the Bluetooth or Devices icon, then choose “AirPlay or Bluetooth” under “Other Devices”.

For me this presents a native popover showing all Bluetooth devices and Apple TV.

Can't you just do that outside of Spotify? It would be nicer if you could in app, but with pavucontrol I have Spotify send music where it belongs.

I'd rather use https://staticz.com/soundcontrol/ (which I do use actually) than rely on an app like Spotify to be honest.

This. I absolutely hate it when apps try to be smart and use their own audio routing.

I'm a Linux user and have multiple audio outputs. I've configured Spotify to always go to my amp / speakers. And it works great.

But then there's Teams, which is absolute sh*tshow. It always says "custom configuration" but you never know where it goes, and partially ignores the configuration in PulseAudio / PipeWire.

I understand why they do this, random users may find it more useful to have this choice directly in front of them, and I would agree... if it worked well! Zoom at least has the good taste to have an entry for "use system settings", which seems to mostly work.

I think that aside from "specialty" applications (like DAWs, etc) regular apps have no business messing around with the system audio settings.

> I think that aside from "specialty" applications (like DAWs, etc)

Or... like audio players, maybe?

And it's not messing around with the system audio settings; it's selecting a audio device other than the system-wide default.

Came here to say this. It was hard enough losing Rdio and now Spotify has been on a rapid decline for the last 1-2 years. It used to be a place to listen to music you already knew and maybe find something new and now they do nothing but shove podcasts down your throat. Who that works there is looking at the current UI as an improvement?

I loved Rdio for the Ui. I subscribed for years. That said Spotify has introduced me to so much music that I missed growing up.

The Spotify UI has been pretty painful lately but I have a hard time living because the suggested music selection has been so good.

I love my 3.5mm cables for this reason. No negotiating with vendors (except Apple but it's well known that they really suck) just plug and play.

I can't wait to sit my grandchildren on my knee and tell them stories of the magic headphones that you never needed to charge and just worked instantly with practically any audio device ever made by mankind right up until the iPhone 7 was unleashed unto the world.

Between their screw ups and Pine64's successes that hopefully won't happen.

Remember to throw in stories about impedance matching and the differences of A/B and T/D class amplifiers, as well as soundstage, acoustic compression and active correction.

At least some of these things are kind of unrelated to how the audio signal arrives at the amplifier and are still an issue when connecting speakers to a bluetooth enabled amplifier.

Absolutely, but the thought that a 3,5mm jack makes everything always compatible is nonsense. Sure, it will work with most consumer products in some way, but it is not a given that it is working as intended.

They would probably see it like we computers that had memory which did not wipe when powered down. The inconvenience is minor and the benefits large. They will never deal with huge hell balls of cables/headphones. The charging is pretty painless and the airpods pretty much do just work instantly with any Apple device (they can detect which one you are using at the time).

Oh, I love a computer voice screaming into my ear "BATTERY! LOW! " every minute when my headphones reach 30%. Yeah, hearing loss is only a small price to pay for not dealing with tangled cables.

And the button that starts a glorified voice "assistant" that I've haven't pressed intentionally once.

Or the pain of switching between paired devices.

At least no more cables getting ripped out of my ears by the door knob.

AirPods do not STT announce a low battery unless that's an accessibility setting. By default they just play a little tone to alert you that your battery is low. An argument can be made around the expensive of AirPods but not when it comes to usability, they are bar none. Watching my Android friends cycle though bluetooth headphones like changing outfits is always interesting to me. Every few months I hear about "check out these awesome headphones, they are so small and they have noise cancelling", yawn, I've been using the same AirPods Pro since they released and they've tried 3+ and still aren't happy. I didn't want to believe it and refused to buy AirPods when they first came out until I got them as a gift and reluctantly used them but after I lost them (or they were stolen, still not sure) it took less than 3 days before I had ordered more. They really are magic.

How is the battery holding up on the Pros? My 1st gen AirPods were dead (each bud only holds about 20 mins of charge) after a year. I then tried a pair of the SoundCore Air Liberty 2 (what a name...) with the same result after a year or so. I can't justify paying $200 every year, so I'm sticking with wired for now.

I mean, I've had the same Pros since launch and I haven't noticed a decrease in the battery. I mean, I'm sure there is a decrease but I listen for hours and hours at a time without issue. If I go longer than 4 hours I might get the low battery notification but they charge so fast that I can either take a break or do the "charge 1 at a time" trick so keep listening.

Roughly how long have you had your Airpod Pros?

I just checked and actually got them for Christmas 2019 (so like 2 months after they released, my mistake, I thought I got them sooner). I use them almost every single day for 30min to 4+ hours depending on what I’m doing.

So to answer your question I’ve had them for around 20 months.

my original airpods were bought feb 2018 and mine still last hours on output only, they last maybe 90 minutes using the microphone on calls though

It's not just charging. You can pretty much connect it to any device in a second without waiting for a minute for bluetooth connection. Maybe airpod is good for single person use who has very limited devices which are all Apple, but I own multiple non Apple devices. Even though all have bluetooth, bluetooth is much more error prone than 3.5mm jack.

It's planned obsolescence. Analog headphones from 15 years will work whereas Airpods will be nigh-unusable after 5 years because the batteries will be spent.

This is completely true but I also just don't really care. The airpods are quite small and use minimal resources so the environmental impact of buying airpods every 5 years is minimal compared to other things. I already do not use a car or public transport so I am well below the average persons resource usage.

And for price, $250AUD every 5 years is well within what I am willing to pay for the convenience of the airpods. I use them daily, I have them in my pocket always. Being able to quickly put them on and take a call and it all just works instantly is worth it to me.

I also have just not ever had in ear headphones ever last that long either. The cable always breaks within a few years max of usage.

I'm with you 100%. If they had a decent podcast experience, I'd be happy to switch but it's terrible. Why can't I mark something as already played?

Yep; I'm a paying customer of spotify and I like some of the podcasts they have. But they don't have the gap removal + speed controls of Overcast (my fav podcast program on my phone). So I'm in this weird situation of never wanting to listen to any podcasts through the spotify app, which I'm paying for. And then when I want to listen to music (eg while coding) I have to wade through podcasts which are intentionally designed to blend in with music recommendations in spotify's apps.

I hate it. If any spotify PMs are listening:

- If spotify wants me to listen to podcasts, let me do it from my existing podcast app. I'm sure the developer of Overcast (and other apps) would happily add a spotify login button for a song if you ask nicely and offered to pay.

- Let users disable podcasts entirely in the spotify app.

- In the spotify app, give podcasts a consistent visual differentiator so I can easily visually separate them from music. Nobody wants to be tricked into listening to a podcast instead of music. Maybe make the "album cover" for podcasts a rectangle instead of a square. Or change the background color for all podcast related content to blue so I can find podcasts visually (or filter them out visually) while scrolling.

I don’t think Spotify wants you to be able to use your favorite app.

Their strategy is to take the open protocol of podcasts and pay the hosts to turn that into centralized tracks on Spotify to force you as the user to use Spotify to listen to it.

It’s about control intentionally - that’s the strategy.

Yeah there's currently a war on to be the YouTube of podcasts and Spotify is currently in the best position.

I was really surprised that Podcasts on Spotify became that popular. Thats what exclusives can do, iI guesd

When I used Spotify I had wished my podcasts were able to be there since it would be convenient to just have the tracks in the same UI.

What I wanted though was just the ability to add podcasts via the open protocol url for them (how every other podcast app works) or for them to allow hosts to upload tracks.

Spotify instead saw an aggregation play - they could pay hosts for exclusivity and take those podcasts away from their open distribution into a distribution entirely controlled by Spotify. This is a hostile move to end users (and ultimately most content creators too in the end).

Spotify has spent over half a billion dollars on acquisitions and investments into its podcasts division, there is zero chance they ever intentionally implement anything that might impede the returns on that spending.

They get ROI if people subscribe to spotify. Why would they care whether I listen to podcasts through their official app or through a 3rd party's app?

If spotify's podcasts are available in my preferred podcast app after I've logged in to my spotify account, they still get paid. And I'll listen to & appreciate way more of their podcasts that way. And they can use it as another funnel for potential customers.

Its win-win.

You can. There's a "Mark as played" button in at least the Android Spotify app that I'm looking at right now.

Can't comment on anything else, though.

If you care about Podcasts, don't listen to them on Spotify, ever. Spotify's plan is to build a walled garden around them.

Spotify promotes podcasts and buys exclusives so desperately, because their plan is to grow their audience to a too-big-to-fail size, so they start dictating their own terms. Every remaining use of RSS is a business opportunity.

It’s insane that Spotify on Mac doesn’t support airplay.

When my girlfriend and I moved in together, we got rid of her Alexa devices because privacy and use HomePods. But Spotify doesn’t work with AirPlay for reasons I cannot fathom, so I set her up with a program that will AirPlay specific applications on her Mac.

That said, there are open source libraries and clients for AirPlay so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get them supported. I have a Raspberry Pi for streaming to “dumb” speakers.

I gave up on Spotify because of this - and because of their hostile moves to turn podcasts into another centralized service.

Apple Music is still mostly worse without discovery, but at least lossless makes up the quality difference that use to be there.

I don’t understand, not a user of Airplay - your Mac doesn’t have a way to stream to airplay devices? Why does it come down to the app?

The Mac can use the Airplay device as an output device, but it's not ideal, because that will send ALL sound to the Airplay device.

The correct solution is for the application to support Airplay, so that for instance Spotify can stream music to your Airplay device, while the Mac sounds still goes to the speakers of the laptop/iMac.

That makes sense, thanks. I remember now I was using Tidal which did have this option.

Airfoil [1] is worth every penny. The same could be said for pretty much everything Rogue Amoeba makes.

It’s also worth noting that Spotify can act as a remote for its own service across devices. So you can start a song playing on your phone and direct the output over AirPlay and then just interface with that session using the desktop client.

[1] https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/

If I understood your problem correctly, you need to listen to Spotify through your HomePod which is on the same local network as your Mac.

This is what I do on macOS. I press on the little megaphone icon (enable it in OS sound preferences) in menu bar and then I can choose my HomePod from the list, without any third party software. I am running Big Sur but in two previous versions I also did the same. Maybe I’m missing something here but I think it should work seamlessly.

That routes all the audio from the mac though, not only Spotify. And with a noticeable delay.

This makes watching a "GIF" with audio (say browsing Reddit), opening a video, answering a slack call, etc. a very bad experience.

Spotify by itself supports its own protocol, whatever that may be, and chromecast. The iOS app should also support Airplay through the OS.

Personally I have a Spotify enabled receiver plugged to my audio system, it works really well.

Got me thinking. I wonder how much scope there is to build apps for platforms like Spotify which are built around a given use case.

For example - for people that prefer listening to albums. Or people that only care about political podcasts. Or something. I wonder if the global audience is enough to support indie products like this.

Significant platform risk though.

i don't like this podcast stuff either. even just the homepage that displays artists (that i will never listen to) is enough to annoy me. i would really love an option to open directly into my playlists or something else. im building up a local music collection at the moment so its not going to be annoying me for too long more

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