Hacker News Reader

Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

The article does say:

> However, the shuffle symbol - two intersecting arrows - still appears on individual album tracks.

> This means it is still possible to start listening to albums on any track and opt for songs to be played in a random order.

The difference seems to be whether the "album page" has a shuffle button on it (which it used to, but now does not).

I'm not a Spotify user myself, but this doesn't sound substantially different to what they had before anyway? As far as I can tell, all it means is they get to put out a press release about how they appeased Adele, but secretly they're still letting users do what they want.

View on HN

As I recall, shuffle used to be pretty prominent on album pages. I think it's good to downrank it because personally I almost never want to shuffle an album, and sometimes I would hit it by accident. I kind of wonder if this is a change that had been considering making to improve user experience but Adelle's tweets just gave them the impetus they needed to actually launch the change.

Spot on - the shuffle button was always overly prominent and a quite annoying default. If Spotify want to spin this into a bit of PR that they support artists so be it.

Maybe in another decade I’ll finally get that ‘hide podcasts’ button I want too!

And a 'hide bad anime covers' button too, please.

At least the way I had spotify set up on my devices „shuffle“ was the default play-option on albums, i.e. pressing the play-button on an album page would start at a random song in shuffle order. I just tested it and I can get the same behaviour as i had before with 3 extra clicks, not too bad.

Yeah, frankly this makes more sense. Default play linearly, shuffle option exists for those that want it for whatever reason. I'd like this to be the behaviour on all albums.

I kind of agree with the change. You can shuffle anywhere you want, but now the default action in albums is "play" instead of "shuffle", which is usually what you want.

I don't see why you'd usually want to listen to an album and specifically have the songs be out of order.

A reason you might want shuffle to be the default is because otherwise you'd listen to the first song in the album many times more often than the last song.

Do people listen to albums like that? I usually add songs to playlists, and that's where I want shuffle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com