Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
neil.computer
neil.computer
The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface, which is actually what I recently started doing: https://i.imgur.com/ar7VrYy.png.
It's still work in progress but actually works perfectly well already. It's not ready for public use yet and also isn't open source yet though. If you want to follow development I guess the best place to do that is my twitter: https://twitter.com/tom_j_watson.
In most big web services, actual functionality in the API normally seems to leads to its eventual deprecation. Will be interesting to see how this one plays out.
Oh, apparently they're completely blocking access now, yay.
7 years to go from announcing the deprecation to actually removing it seems fair to me. Miles difference from what I'd expect any other company to do (looking at you Google, who seem to announce a deprecation and go through with it in the very same month).
With some caveats though as I mentioned in another comment. Their API for controlling playback doesn't work well with Sonos players for example.
Any that still work are using librespot, which uses their undocumented smart device API
Does anyone else get a dystopian vibe from this statement? I feel like the old guy in the SF movie pulling his hair and exclaiming, "But what have we lost?!" We used to have vinyl, tapes, finally CDs, and even the ability to rip our library to a computer, which we could carry with us. It was naturally artist/album/track organized, required no internet, came with no tracking, centralized control, or subscription.
(A year ago I bought a (now very cheap) nice CD player, a (now very cheap) separate amp and speakers, and a nice (somehow not very cheap) turntable, and it's great! I even kind of like the strong bias toward playing the same album multiple times - good music is complex, intricate, and it rewards relistening like a book rewards rereading. And listening the way the artist recorded is, IMHO, far superior to the digital dystopian DJ of spotify.)
It’s just that Spotify has decided that the way to optimise revenue is to focus on being an exclusive provider of some original contents in the form of podcasts and has slowly started making the listening music side of the application worse and worse since.
Nobody wants CD players :(
My laptop is smaller than any collection of CDs and can store an entire building of them in the space of 12 jewel cases.
If you include my phone and a cellular connection for streaming, the entire world of music can be accessed in a device smaller than any portable CD player. And the speakers in my iPhone are better than most stereos from the same era.
We truly live in the world where science fiction has become reality. :D
A while back, my wife and I went for a week way out in the sticks. We live in Oregon, and our favorite place is out in the Ochoco high desert National Forest. And nothing works there. I mean nothing except for AM radio late at night.[1]
After a few days, our hearing settles back to what is supposed to be normal. City life is loud and our hearing system compensates in various ways that reduce our ability to really appreciate sound.
After hearing that our ability to listen has relaxed into high potential mode, we decided to get the MacBook out and watch a movie. We had been saving this experience for a good time and it all came together nicely!
We were blown away![0]
Seriously. The amount and quality, fidelity of sound coming out of that MacBook was insane! Of course it all was soft on the low end. Not too much we could do about that because physics, but otherwise the whole experience was a real treat!
I find it difficult to communicate the impact. Here we are, gentle noises from our camp fire a modest distance away, various crackles, pops, hisses and an equally gentle breeze and our own bodies were the only sounds present outside of the movie sound track.
Mixed in nicely with all that was our movie. Actually a couple of them because we repeated the experience a couple times. It was so damn good!
All I can really say here is you should definitely give this a try!
So much engineering, better materials, better software, and it all adds right the fuck up. I really did not expect what I heard at all. Very highly recommended.
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[0] And to be clear, I am talking about all that we did hear when we did not expect to. Truth is, we were camping with a MacBook. The sound we heard wea respectable, despite it being small speakers and all that goes mobile devices.
It seemed sci-fi like to us. The tech advances, engineering all add up. And that's the blown away part. Experiencing a sum like that, rather than incrementally. The context really helped raise the impact.
[1] And that is a great experience! Any radio will be fun, but if you can get hold of a 70's maybe 80's era one with multiple frequency bands, say short wave, broadcast, and any others, the isolation means getting to connect to the world old school tuning stuff in from all over the place!
AM, on a good radio, is an interesting experience and again on a good radio optimized for what the tech actually does, will sound better than you think. And how it colors the material is something I crave. Comes from growing up listening to a fine Zenith "Trans Oceanic" radio with almost god like performance, but I digress...
In a more normal office setting, I am far more inclined to use the built in speaker and mic combo myself when using my Apple device.
Otherwise, my goto is actually the Samsung AKG pack in earbuds that came with my Note phones. Mic is great, audio quality also great. Those have a wire.
I do not mind a wire. Always works.
Me too! They are falling apart at this point, 3 or 4 years later, but wow. They have so many nice little features like a cloth braided cable that helps keep them from knotting themselves, and very comfy ear pieces. And of course they sound great, and because they are cheap (~$15) I never worry about losing them. AKG found some sort of global minima of price/performance, and it's cool Samsung recognized that. I will admit, though, that not having a wire is really nice, it's just all the trade-offs are awful. In particular the cost is high AND the likelihood to lose a component of them is very high (for me). Plus the rigamarole around keeping them charged and getting them paired...to all that I say "bah humbug!"
I have 4 of these, in the bags, ready to go.
Love them so much! Their response curve works for my sense of hearing. Hard to get better, just different.
Overstock had those things for $10 some time back and I bought a handful, and I am glad I did.
Did you live in this era? I don’t think you know what you are talking about.
I remember my dad's mid-60s KLH speakers sounding good with a mid-70s Sansui solid state receiver in the early 80s, before one of the tweeters fried and the paper woofer cones really deteriorated.
I remember how beautiful his early 60s Citation tube amp sounded in the early 90s, after we rebuilt it with new electrolytic capacitors and tubes, hooked it up to mid-80s Infinity bookshelf speakers, and drove it with a Sony CD player that had a built-in volume control for its line-out. That amp was based on a video amplifier circuit design and so had decent characteristics not just past audible but nearly into MHz (if it weren't for the low-pass filtering effects of the final transformers and speakers).
I remember how those same Infinity speakers, despite poly woofer cones, also degraded by the mid-90s due to the endemic fungal rot that took all the foam speaker surrounds of that era. A power spike or transport damage also killed one of the tweeter coils. I lived for a while overseas and found an affordable shop where a guy hand rebuilt these speakers for me, replacing the rotten woofer surrounds with contemporary butyl rubber and rewinding the tweeter coil. They sounded just like new again, and I was happy to confirm that my ears were not to blame. I left those behind after another move, so cannot report on their longevity.
It amuses me to think that my "new" hifi setup is almost 15 years old now, with tower speakers and a class D Yamaha receiver that I use as the DAC whether driven by HDMI or TOSlink from a USB audio peripheral. Just like my earlier hifi setups, the limiting factor is room acoustics and practical matters like not upsetting nearby cohabitants or neighbors. I continue to be somewhat boggled by the atrocious sound people are willing to inflict on themselves with phone, computer, or little bluetooth speakers that don't even sound as good as an early 80s "ghetto blaster".
I'm sorry to say I wimped out and, despite the low price and power efficiency, didn't try one of these, and opted for an older power hungry design. What did you get? I actually have an extra pair of the B&W speakers I got for my main system and was thinking of using them for the TV, but I don't want another clunky amp out there.
I bought a rather mid-level Yamaha home theater receiver with Dolby and DTS decoding back in the late 2000s, It is labeled as an HTR-6140 and must be discontinued for many years by now. It has a bunch of DSP scenes/modes. Other than wanting surround decoding and HDMI + TOSlink inputs, I did not geek out on specs. I merely assume it is class D because the whole receiver is pretty light, so no big heat sinks, and it doesn't seem to produce much waste heat compared to older receivers I've used.
My boss, on the other hand, collects the damn things. He's got an entire large bookshelf filled with vintage CD players...
To me, vinyl is a collectible, or at least, a way to show "yes I appreciate this music and want to show off that I enjoy it". If I like an artist/album enough, I'll buy the vinyl if I can. But it usually just sits on the shelf looking pretty. I got lucky and my player (nothing special but it works so long as you have a good cartridge) was from my dad. When I actually listen to said album, it's usually on my phone over bluetooth (earbuds or in the car), or even if I'm listening on the "hi fi" it's streaming.
Not to say that I never play albums on the turntable, it's just not that often.
Now I feel old. I remember the first time I saw and heard a Compact Disc. It was a rainbow colored object straight from the future. It was magical, the whole family gathered around the little boom box like thing playing some classical music CD.
Also, I hope your boss doesn't actually listen to any CD player built before about the mid 00's or so. Maybe mid-90s if you're talking mega-bucks (at the time) like a Mark Levinson or Theta Digital. But advances in DACs in the last ~20 years made everything prior very obsolete. Nowadays you can get commodity chips in the single digit dollar range that are for all intents and purposes faultless.
make a comment or thread about spotify/pandora/tidal and sit back and wait to see how long it takes for some “audiophile” to come along and to admonish you and tell you a story about their setup and music appreciation “workflow” and how it is better and somehow more correct.
we lost nothing. it is all still here. and, apparently, the added bonus of droves of sweaty people telling you you’re doing it wrong. life is grand.
Nor am I claiming I'm more correct (although I guess I'm pretty proud of having found a somewhat contrarian path to take the trade-offs I think matter most.) You want to listen to spotify on your phone and bt headphones - all of which is subject to decay, decay of money, battery, connectivity - meanwhile I'll listen to my library with wired components that run smoothly and no latency without drops or a monthly bill. You get all-in-one go anywhere convenience, I get old school tactile control. Neither of us is doing it wrong. But yeah, I like mine better which is why I do it that way (and I assume the same is true for you, unless you're a masochist, and if so I say great, keeping doing you.)
if you ignore the massive amount of music that hasn't been - or often cannot be - released on streaming services, maybe?
We've lost: cover art, liner notes, the ability to share or sell your music without 3rd party permission, music stores, and in many cases local music scenes that formed around music stores. Bret Victor has been harping on this for years, but we've also lost a great deal of tactility - putting a CD in a player and pressing buttons to play it uses your hands in pleasant ways that screens just aren't.
As for discovery, the promise is greater than reality. I used Spotify for a while specifically for this purpose, but I didn't discover a single new artist through it. YouTube, by contrast, has introduced me to new artists, as have a few radio stations like KCRW and KQED (who both have excellent YT channels too). And you know what? Music discovery is a different mode of listening than enjoying my library and ne'er the twain shall meet, IMHO.
Spotify does have cover art for albums, at least for me it does.
> Music discovery is a different mode of listening
For me it really is the same mode. I regularly discover new artists when my handcrafted playlists finish playing and it starts to play music based on the playlist I just listened to
I think parent means something like this: https://www.encartespop.com.br/2012/09/encarte-pink-floyd-da...
The vinyl and especially CD covers were sometimes a little more than just barren images.
That's surprising. I've never used Spotify for this, but 10+ years ago used Pandora for that purpose. I was overjoyed with the new artists I learned about.
Spotify is amazing for discovery, they’re holding it wrong.
Why would you say that? It's a pretty harsh dig, and it's not justified. I tried Spotify and didn't like it. I never said I hated it. I don't like it because I weight its trade-offs differently than you. I mean, have YOU tried the alternative I've suggested? If not, is it because of your ideology?
1. Cover art / liner notes - any given digital album can include links to these notes or even a website with the cover art, and if you're referring to the physical component I would argue that's just less trash that comes with the predominant reason for me purchasing music... which is the music.
2. Ability to share music - I frequently share music from Spotify all the time, either using the Spotify link and sending it to my friends over Chat, or even just telling them the name of it and they can frequently find the exact song on YouTube.
3. Ability to sell music - since I'm not really purchasing the music on Spotify I don't feel like this is a fair argument
4. Music stores - i'll give you this one though for a lot of us we simply don't have the free time to physically browse for music in a brick and mortar store.
5. Discovery - anecdotal of course but I've had the exact opposite experience, the Discover weekly list that Spotify provides invariably introduces me to new artists that I would've otherwise never even heard of, and if I like a song I can look for playlists curated by users that contain that song, which is an additional avenue of discovery.
Yup, that is the core issue. We have all this great tech, but then deploy it against ourselves. The peak is when FB optimized for polarized (ahem fake) content, because that is what drives "engagement".
I'm not sure what is the solution here. Regulations around more algorithmic transparency? "Low tech" alternatives? User education?
Other people like streaming, and want The Algorithm to feed them discovery, and that's fine--it's just not for me.
I mean if Spotify UX is bad, YouTube is absolutely trash. I have to pay to be able to stream media if my phone is locked.
Not really.
It's easier than ever to be exposed to a select group of pre-selected songs by a small subset of artists churned out by a computer program for the purpose of getting you to continue your subscription. That's not discovery.
Go into any real music store, like Louisiana Music Factory in New Orleans, Amoeba Music in Los Angeles, or Electric Fetus in Minneapolis, and you'll find thousands of albums and artists that are not on streaming, never have been on streaming, and never will be on streaming.
The tech companies have made people believe that they're seeing everything, but they're not. They're just looking through a keyhole into the world of music.
For example, Apple boasts something like 90 million songs on Apple Music. The reality check is that's probably less than 1% of the world's recorded music.
People on HN rail against "walled gardens" in app stores, and then wall themselves into one streaming service or the other because they bought the infinite music hype, and don't even know it.
I can spin this argument directly around and guarantee that if you go to the Louisiana music factory in New Orleans, that for every artist and album they know about, there are 1000 international or country specific artists that are available only online to listeners in America via online channels.
If the music is worth listening to, the medium shouldn't matter at all.
To a certain extent, but across the arts there's always artists that want to play with the format, so a changing of format can result in something being re-contextualised.
For example, you can have [multisided vinyl][1] with hidden tracks, or loop a track onto itself so the record plays forever (like Sergeant Pepper). Neither are really possible with MP3 (there's a Brian Eno record that does both (the track bifurcates and loops at them end), so you get a random sample looping at the end of the LP).
I am not saying this means the enjoyment of the music is lessened when you listen to it digitally - just that plenty of artists have written and produced pieces with the physical format at the front of their minds.
As an Eno fan I'm not familiar with the mentioned album.
King Crimson would put hidden messages printed in the vinyl inner track, I remember seeing "The next step is Discipline", which was their next album.
I also miss the thriving bootleg community, picture discs.
For the record, VLC supports DVD menus and the Matroska container format (mkv, mka, mks, and the basis for webm) supports all of the features imagined so far. I believe the demand for the content far outweighed the demand for the presentation layer.
All of these forms of interactivity however didn't prove popular in the digital world. Think of DVD's again. How often would you have ripped a DVD into a 4 or 8 GiB ISO in order to preserve the full experience and how often would you have rather ripped just the video file ~400 MiB, reencoded using a modern codec. Netflix optimises for the latter.
If you allow for programability, all features of music albums and more can be recreated.
What people want is no fuss instant access to the popular music of the moment therefore we have streaming services with good enough quality for most people and vast enough but incomplete collections of music. All while navigating the maze of licensing internationally.
How many listeners do you believe would rather open Spotify/iTunes/WinAmp and press play to hear music and how many would rather navigate a album specific experience.
If experience is so important, it can still be done in the streaming focused world of today (without standardised formats like Matroska). Just package it as an app (native or web), publish it on the app stores and let the app store take a 30% cut. Apps do not appear to be a popular format for music albums or for movies, even though they were attempted.
Quite often, historically, music comes as part of a complete experiential package. Gatherings around fire, singing and dancing in groups, celebrating life's milestones, getting dressed up for concerts, excitement at buying tickets, journeying in and out of the city to pick up new recordings.
All of those things are valid aspects of musical culture for me. Stripping the meta musical aspects from the musical experience is inherently lossy and in some ways diminishes the full spectrum of what music can be.
This is especially true for music that was created outside of and/or before the streaming milieu.
Some things are lost again with the move to streaming and, again, some things are lost.
I was uncomfortable with the idea that the meta musical aspects of one milieu were shallow and that the music should be something that can essentially survive being stripped of them if it was ever of value at all.
I guess going to a museum to view artwork is an incredibly shallow experience for you?
An original artwork is just that - best when the original is viewed. A CD, Tape, or Vinyl is in no way "the original".
Maybe different people value different things?
Whereas music is produced with the transference of auditory information in mind (album art, concerts, and all the physical swag garbage is ancilliary)
Now don't get me wrong, of course there are still lots of people doing music for the fun of it, people still go to live performances, people still share recommendations. So it isn't fully lost by any means, just a question of degrees.
Now it's like our old dreams in name only. It hits all the bullet points, but the functionality is all wrong because companies want to make users the dataset rather than operators in control. And while one of their incentives is user satisfaction, it's competing with engagement, revenue side channels, price discrimination, etc.
For the same money as your glorious 80s stereo, adjusted up, you can still get glorious audio today.
Not as bad as you might suppose.
My wife has a 1983 Panasonic turntable/radio/cassette player that she uses sometimes. We're talking about low build quality, hot pink, designed for the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl who will listen while simultaneously squeeing on a three-way call on a Garfield phone. It's not bad. Neither of us have perfect hearing, and are far from audiophiles.
The key is the right media for the right device.
When she's playing brand new, 180-gram, super-hipster vinyl, her expensive modern gear in the living room is where it sounds best.
But when she's playing a 1983 copy of Girls Just Want To Have Fun, it sounds best on the pink Panasonic. Pretty much any record made before 2000 sounds better on the period-correct turntable, compared with the high-end player, and vice-versa.
She will only listen to cassettes — new or old — on the 1983 machine, even though she has a Panasonic cassette boom box that she bought in Japan in 2019. The old gear just sounds better.
More and more she's been finding music on Apple Music during her lunch hour, then buying the vinyl or cassette to listen to the music at home. Again, she's not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but she finds the sound of analog much more pleasant. To me, it's pretty close, but less "sterile," for lack of a better word.
It’s crazy how bad these are, they manage to ruin a lot of great songs.
Not really, there is a lot missing from Spotify, and not just obscure music. And you have to accept the fact that music may (and does) go missing at any time.
Plus, even for songs that are on the platform, you are forced to listen to what version they have, which is almost always a "remastered" version. Example: early Beatles songs have vocals hard-panned to one side, which sounds terrible on headphones. It sounds way better on the original mono version.
Spotify is a mediocre experience at best for music nerds, which is probably what the person you're responding to is (has an amp and speakers, vinyl, etc).
Spotify allows the vast majority of music listeners far more access to far more music than ever in history.
Somewhat agreed, although I suspect that may be more of an Apple/Beatles decision as to what versions to make available. Having 3-4 versions of each song may create more confusion for people. But... it's a shame that many of those versions aren't available (original mono, original stereo, remastered mono, remastered stereo, etc). I do see that Apple Music has some more options (US box set, for example), but even then, those are the US stereo/mono, and the UK mono/stereo mixes are, in some/many cases, different.
Anything I like I can easily access in ALAC on any device from anywhere in the world.
The Spotify forums seem to suggest this is because someone licensed that one song differently and conditions have changed, so I'm no longer entitled to play it.
That seems bonkers to me, but regardless of the reason, the effect is infuriating.
I ditched Spotify a while back and I'm slowly clawing my way back into physical CDs, ripping and encoding (or not even bothering to encode; storing as plain WAV still doesn't take that much space given modern hard drives), and trying to ensure that songs don't vanish out from under me ever again.
True, I have experienced that. I love the apps, but I ended up switching to youtube premium due to that.
Anything that isn't in youtube music as a song, usually is available as a video either uploaded by the artists themselves or as a "not so legal" upload. Not a fan of the apps though.
Is that really the case? Anecdotally I'm earning 50k in EU.
Yes, but the OP's point is that it's not really at the "click of a button" because the search appears designed specifically to make it easy to find playlists of songs but not individual songs (likely for royalty reduction reasons).
When I was a kid, I naively imagined when I was in my 50s, as I am now, we'd be much closer to many of the visions of future painted in media from Popular Mechanics magazine to science fiction. Today, I understand and accept why we don't have the proverbial "flying cars", but I am disappointed when stuff we already recently had (and could easily still have) is unavailable for bad reasons. As a technologist, I find this especially frustrating.
You could say the same thing about an all-you-can-eat buffet. You won't end up eating the whole restaurant, and if you do they'll kick you out.
"Basically every song ever recorded" is a red herring to strip you of ownership of your media.
To say nothing of all the playlists I've made that have holes blown in them like swiss cheese because the streaming rights got revoked. What if Spotify turns the way of Netflix?
Want to listen to albums? Stop using Spotify. I honestly don't get why people choose that one. Youtube music blows it out of the water, and you can get ad-free youtube with it as well, and share all of it with your "family". Plus it has whole albums as one of the options when you search for artist/song.
This may be true, but you could always just buy the good albums. I owned a number of CDs/cassettes back in the day and I would listen to them and enjoy them front-to-back, over and over.
Another aspect of it is that very often what's familiar sounds good, so by listening to the whole album, all of it (or more of it) would start to sound good, not just the radio tracks you were already familiar with.
Finally, there are tracks on some albums that may seem odd, or not even particularly musical out of context, but still add to the overall experience (e.g. "Fitter, Happier" on OK Computer, or the instrumental filler tracks on Ill Communication).
I wore out my Synchronicity tape back in the 80s :) Listened to the album randomly a couple of months ago and it is spooky how the experience re-asserted itself into my being. I just know every nook and cranny of the album.
Yes - I suspect many kids who are happy with Spotify haven't had the experience. (It's actually a similar trade-off with broadcast TV - I'm realizing now with kids the downsides to having on-demand every episode of every show ever made, versus having to wait until next week and having to be there at a particular time. Gives you time to digest, anticipate, and enjoy. And I always muted the ad breaks, which made them tolerable.)
For me at this point it’s mostly porting. I have a ton of playlist and some are quite large and it would horribly tedious to port over by hand.
I’ve tried some automated tools in the past, but YouTube doesn’t always have correct of necessary title/artist metadata and there were a lot of bad matches.
Maybe you haven't found the right albums? You should listen to St. Vincent's first 3 albums - they are really good. More recently, Emma Ruth Rundle "On Dark Horses" is fantastic, or anything by Lisa Hannigan. Recording artists are more and more aware that people are not consuming albums in one sitting, but that's still how music is produced! Vinyl is one reason but another, I think, is that "album" is the most useful abstraction for the artist to think in when it comes to making a thing.
I don't like the playlist (and now, TikTok)-driven market--I too prefer listening to a full album straight through--but there's not really anything more inherently musical about the formats that came before. For better or worse, that's just the nature of the industry.
Most people don’t, however, because it is much cheaper and easier to stream. Clearly what we have lost is not worth the price to maintain what we had, or people would still be buying music instead of streaming.
Still works great with zero compatibility issues that I've noticed.
this UI update (the version after the April 30 2021 version) should be recorded as a possible worst UI change in the history of software.
apt version tells me the good version is 1:1.1.42.622 (the most recent is 1:1.1.84.716).
Our interface was optimized for low royalties, not the end user. Maybe it is the same situation now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEMA_(German_organization)
I was getting the feeling that search has become increasingly crappier. Not just Spotify, but also in other places like Google, Facebook and DuckDuckGo. Search for anything and you'll get something "pausibly deniability" close to what you typed, but optimized for metrics that are way beyond the user's comprehension.
I feel like singling out Facebook, the worst offender: Their search is optimized for "engagement", i.e., distracting you from what you originally looked for, without you immediately realizing it.
Worse yet is that if I pause there for a moment, the search results continue to reorganize themselves, so that by the time I'm ready with a screenshot, the wrong answer has vanished. I can only catch it on video.
How did search turn so terrible?
Not enough people complained, and/or voted with their dollars and/or attention.
The few people who do complain are inevitably answered with the ever-present refrain of the Windows fan club ("You just don't like change!"), which effectively cuts off any avenues for argument in favor of the perfectly-good status quo. The only way forward from that point is down.
Whether that is a consequence of it becoming harder, or by design is the important question. I can think of a few reasons an uninformed or misinformed general public would benefit some people.
My guess is that playlists lead to more engagement than albums. Users listen longer, and discover new music, which leads to more listening in the future.
[1] https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/?question=per-stream-rate
This is how Bandcamp works. I greatly prefer it to Spotify, but only because I'm not generally interested in mainstream bands.
One of the few services that seems to give Linux users like myself a decent experience
With Apple Music here is the info: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212183
I made a simple app to shuffle Spotify albums that you might like. Check it out at www.bandtr.com
When I turn that mother up on and my CRT monitor starts smoking because of the Winamp addons that spikes all kinds of shit whenever the tune is changing, then I know I have found the right track.
Then I get cracking on the floor. Break dancing and caps flying around. The neighbors come jumping in the door and starts clapping and the music just keeps going.
Everybody can understand a list of songs, even my grandma who's pushing 84. So we battle out songs on each of ours computers, but we don't use Spotify any more.
If it's not, please write it.
My biggest gripe with spotify is it's inability to reliably answer the question of "what playlist or source am I currently listening too?". A constant flow that spotify fails to deliver on is this: Search for a song, play the song, then the rest of the album, on repeat, without shuffle. It's annoying to have to load multiple slow UIs to navigate from search to album, visually search the album's track list and play the song your after.
Itunes and Windows Media Player set the standard for how media should be navigated and Spotify should use some of those old standard concepts.
EDIT:
Try browsing Armin Van Buuren's massive discography on Spotify.
I really don't understand what happened between then and now, it was really a big deal at the time where the UI was snappy and playing a song was almost instantaenous. Nowadays, while the playback speed is still just as snappy, the UI feels much worse
[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/102309/spotify-will-launch-in-the-...
1. They test their UI with their target users (assumes they have a handle on who pays $$$ for the service besides ad revenue)
2. People who just want functionality are not a high percentage of users or use cases
3. A good number of users/use cases value visual feedback via simple, larger imagery over condensed information displays (condensed displays are also harder to design well)
4. There are halo and competitive effects, and all apps of a certain class end up looking alike and imitating each other's visual languages and decisions, with design gradually drifting towards a new set of rules that become 'standard'.
By that metric I think the redesign has succeeded, I've soft churned but they get the subscription and pay out no royalties.
Never assign to malice yadda yadda yadda... but there's no way such an atrocious redesign doesn't have an ulterior motive. The designers have done their job well it's just optimizing for something else.
It's also not easy to move away from it. It requires time and effort. Time that many don't have.
I thought it was just me! I did notice that sometimes when this happens the numbers being skipped are “this song is currently not available for playback” or some such message.
I seem to listen to the same music a lot actually so just buying the CD would be more cost efficient.
[1]: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...
I find it pigeon holes me into a category that may or may not appeal to me, and I get to listen/view what they want me to experience, rather than let me choose & explore without manipulation. No, thanks, is my response.
I really hate that. They are completely different pieces of content but NOOOO, they want to be the "all audio" platform.
I wonder if it's just different ways that people listen to music that lead them to prefer one service over another?
But then they started butchering it more and more and now it's almost completely unusable.
I've been a paying customer since 2009 and I'm thinking of cancelling, I don't use it any more because it's just a mess.
I started using it when it was launched or shortly after, before most of the alternatives (including Youtube Music) even existed. It was great ~10 years ago.
I still use it because I'm invested into it: we have our premium family account, with all smart speakers configured to play songs using it, we have playlists, out of the music I like I know what's available and what's missing and I have acquired what's missing by other means (but switching to another service would mean different songs/artists would be missing, etc.)
Compound that with lack of time (work, parenting, etc.) and while the Spotify UX has really gone downhill, it would have to get really, really bad for me to switch...
Walled gardens are evil. But so convenient...
That being said I have started collecting vinyl, which I do enjoy, but don’t often have the extra money laying around each month to buy more. One day I hope to have a nice dedicated setup for it :)
By the way, I'm always tempted to go back to pirating, and use these services just to discover new music. Given the cost of storage today disks I can easily get 1Tb of FLAC music on my NAS, and discard any streaming service. So I can also get music in a quality that you can't get on a streaming service, all you find is remastered albums that doesn't always sound as good as the original.
I've switched to Youtube music and never looked back, better (simpler ui), live music, (no ads in Youtube since I have to pay anyway cause otherwise it becomes unusable).
For some people Spotify is the next best thing since sliced bread, but I think I'm onto the pattern, Spotify is great if you like to vibe with what other people are listening to, all the suggestions seem to lead to the mainstream. I don't mean it in any kind of dissing way, I honestly think it's great that there's a sort of communal feeling where people are listening to the same things, but for my particular tastes it drives me crazy to start with my obscure weird hipstery song and 6 songs later it's suggesting Reggaeton. YT music seems to flow in the direction of similar songs way better.
I know I honestly sound like a Google shill, but I honestly pretty much dislike (I was going to use despise but it's too strong of a word) what they have become, but my pragmatism just makes me keep going back to them (unfortunately?).
1. Subscribed me to every single artist in my artist library on YouTube. It took a long time to clean up my YouTube subscriptions.
2. All my playlists are also YouTube playlists, which isn’t what I want.
3. The tool was fully incapable of transferring my library over, because YouTube music’s API is limited. So no albums or artists can transfer to the library section.
If I can’t transfer my library over, keeping a semblance of organization (such as maintaining a chronological list of “date added” for my songs), I’m gonna struggle to use any alternatives when Spotify does good enough.
There should still be a master “turn off podcasts” button, although since it’s the only way Premium subscribers are still exposed to ads, fat chance of that happening.
I get the business incentives, but I have to imagine some manager somewhere going "Perfect, it's both audio content!".
I've been having to work around it by copying over the playlist I was shuffled, running it through shuf, and then putting it in to a separate playlist, and lastly, disable shuffle. It's garbage, but it's better than what Spotify produces.
I'm sure their stats tell them that this gets people to skip less, but it's infuriating when you actually want to shuffle a big list.
Initially I though “oh cool neat”, and although I never noticed inaccuracies, I was willing to let it to, lyric listings aren’t always 100% accurate anyway, especially for older underground stuff of people who have indecipherable vocals at times (Mike IX Williams for example)
However as time passed I noticed in a ton of the songs I was listening to, the lyrics would be missing entire verses, hooks, choruses or in occasion show the lyrics to a 100% unrelated song. There were also blatant typos, that looked like someone was quickly typing the lyrics on their phone and didn’t check to read and bad autocorrects or anything.
Horrendous, but the capability is still there and, of course, completely impossible to find.
With Spotify, it would often be an update that looks pretty but was harder to use, which is the exact opposite of what I care about… I’m here to listen to music as fast as possible and get on with my life, not scroll through giant menus with way too much spacing, when it used to all fit on one screen.
There are still usability issues with Tidal that are similar to Spotify (hard to find something specific, etc), but they basically never change anything about the core UI, it just always works the exact same with some minor additions here&there. And honestly it’s reduced my frustration dramatically.
I'm thinking about switching since native spotify app's playing gif (or icon) spikes my CPU usage for some very strange reason.
Back in the day I use Rdio, which had a pretty good UI; unfortunately they shut down.
I've switched to Deezer which I find saner, but I fear these streaming companies just aren't incentivised to produce simple interfaces.
Pick one already.
The results are quite predictable: numbers that go up, and UX that goes way, way down. Eventually this falls over because your model ends up in local maxima.
I have no doubt Spotify is doing the same. Every large company does it. This practice of data-driven development is such a disgrace to the IT industry.
I don't get how people can be comfortable using that stuff at all.
Found out they have been doing it for years to people, and if you complain they basically refer you to the suggestion box and to go f yourself. I don't get it. Why would you want to torment paying customers like that? Just leave me alone and let me play some music you psycopaths.
So I switched back to Apple music. It's pretty shit, but at least I get to decide what I want to listen too.
I love and hate Apple Music. The library style interface is great. But for a company that hangs on about the virtue of native apps the Music app is complete dogshit. Even with the recent slightly more native “rewrite” I still spend ages waiting for screens to load. Spotify is so much snappier.
That's the problem with today's tech industry. The objective is not money, it's "growth and engagement".
(and I switched to Apple too)
Fuck Spotify. Any user problem gets referred to the suggestion box where you'll always be told to go fuck yourself. That's the only attitude they know: fuck you with a generic smile.
There's this feature that they think is neat, and nobody wants, where they'll switch to whatever device you pick up and pick up where you left off. The problem is that for many users, the only thing it does is persistently switch to whatever device you're not using, including your neighbor's, thereby rendering the whole app 100% unusable. And you can't turn it off.
There's a 7-year-long thread on their support forum - the only recourse - going right up to the present day, of people begging them either make the feature optional or fix it. And the only response they ever give is a straight "We are not going to fix this."
Fuck. Spotify.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Turn-off-Spotify-Co...
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Connect-Make-S...
Look how the fuckers mark the second one “Solved” for their decision to do dick about it. Primo customer service.
To increase cross sell with underrepresented artists or whatever the strategy is with this UI its quite a detriment when looking for songs you want.
If i wanted to discover artists id like to be able to do that myself, not have it be imposed on my search because of the way the designer thought it up, to increase cross sell to things i had no intention of listening to.
It's almost like a paid version of spam.
time to sail those musical seas
Well put.
It seems they are trying to optimize for listener time. It makes sense for the free offering as listening time is advertisement time is income.
But for the paid version what they should strive for is costumer satisfaction.
Turns out that's a lot harder to measure and related, but not at all the same as listening time or 'engagement'.
Taking thrice as long and twice as many clicks to get where I want to be increases the engagement metric and my dissatisfaction.
Some time ago I moved to Tidal. It's not perfect, the search is inferior, the app bugs out sometimes too; but at least they don't seem to change it that much.
Edit: Continuing to read the HN comments, it seems some people (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31618177) have a constantly shifting UI, possibly driven by Spotify doing A/B testing. Could be that some locations (the US?) are subjected to this while others are not. I've used a total of 5 accounts since I started using Spotify, and never had anything change day-to-day when using it, so doesn't seem to be account-based.
A designer I know advocated that users should be coaxed into using shorter titles and descriptions so that the UI looks good. It just makes me seethe.
This is why they were advocating for "Concise Titles" instead of "Titles that are Short Enough to Read, but Long Enough to Convey Info!"
We’re building enterprise-internal software. There’s ton of jargon that is in play that we can’t really shorten or guide. It’s insane to think that the users, experts with decades of experience in their domain, should editorialize to fit a design goal. Sometimes, the users do know best.
But the listing only shows the part you don't read!
The end result is a bad experience for both the developer, the customer and the end user.
My collection is 99% classical. The problem is especially bad for classical tracks. “Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op…” What opus, what movement? what tempo marking? Yes I’ll go back and tell Beethoven to change the title to something shorter and catchier. “Joy, Bros!” Is that better?
It’s some kind hubris to think your UI (itself the result of design laziness) is a bigger priority than the integrity of the composer’s intent.
Salient examples are the alternative Twitter interfaces that proliferated, and indeed those for Hacker News. One huge benefit is that users won't be stuck with a single, often hostile UI, but be free to either interpret data client-side, or make use of a possible open market in presentation layer websites which may add their own value.
Infrastructure/service providers cannot be allowed to continue to control the interfaces that are used to access their services.
It's a follow up to an earlier article where he lays out the table stakes for streaming apps, both worth reading.
So a bunch of people in their spare time seem to be doing a better job than Netflix, why is that? Because I don't think Netflix is trying to achieve the same goal
They are trying to push content Netflix wants you to watch. Not content that you want to watch.
Do most users want to be told what to consume?
Circumstantially I'd guess so, because otherwise it's a lot of effort to add friction for no reason.
But I don't know.
Possibly Spotify and Netflix do. Or possibly not. Perhaps they're just dysfunctional?
For me is that I just refuse to pay because I know they can just do a regular interface but they want to trick you into some stuff with their UI.
I just don't feel in the mood of paying for being treated as laboratory mice.
As a sibling commenter says, these issues are not an "expert mode" problem, you can see regular people facing them too. But they usually give up and eventually comply, watching something else. The frustration is still there, but we bitch about it and try something else, while a bunch of people just go watch Trending Show #229.
(I realize it might sound harsh/pretentious/"sheeple", but it genuinely happened to me last month. I wanted to watch Truman Show with my nephew at my sister's house, and it was a genuine clown show to try to find a service that would play it. Netflix didn't have it, their ISP's service didn't have it, it was available on Apple TV but we couldn't get the device to work because it required an update and we didn't have a computer at hand to be able to pair it or whatever, I was there so we even tried casting from a piracy app in my phone, but their Smart TV only accepted some weird proprietary method that was not available on my phone, so we ended up watching El Camino, a terribly mediocre Breaking Bad spinoff, my nephew was bored halfway through and went to play Fortnite instead)
I like "lean-back listening" and that's the whole reason I'm still sticking with Spotify. They (almost) always have something to accompany my mood both out of songs I already like and new ones I often also like (yay!). The drift in mood is minimal. I can listen to calm piano music for a whole night while Apple music can shift over to loud metal within only a few songs (what a joke).
It may be getting worse, though. Especially a few songs keep playing over and over, sometimes despite me explicitly blocking them. Both a lot of new or familiar songs often show up at times at which I want just the other - and of course you can't choose (what a joke! The algorithm is great, just badly tuned, let me change it!).
> If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
Nowadays I exclusively pirate movies and shows, because just the thought of having to spend 30 minutes to figure out where some movie is, then trying to navigate the respective service's interface, just to be presented with a not-empty-but-actually-doesnt-show-what-i-was-searching-for-because-stats-said-people-might-watch-more-if-you-mislead-them-in-search-results-pages because it is not available on my region, and then trying to figure out what combination of VPN and region incantations won't block me behind a million captchas, is too much work to be bothered with.
Instead, I just open Stremio, put in the movie or show name, and even if it is some obscure Javanese arthouse film from the '20s (I don't know if such a thing exists, but you get the point) it will find it. Sure, finding a source with good availability is sometimes not the first-click experience, but it's still at least 10 times faster than all the above. And I can put on screen sharing to watch it with my friends without DRM blacking out the screen.
Worst of all, the pricing structures of streaming apps are very opaque, so if I were to do the still-illegal-but-morally-correct thing of paying for the official product and pirating anyways, I don't think any of my subscription fee would actually go to the company that made that film.
I wish we had a functioning rental model still. Go to some storefront, pay a small amount of money to get any publisher's title, get a video file to play "at home" (in your preferred video player), pinky swear you didn't rip it, done. The closest you get is the Youtube rental thingy, but at least over here it is incredibly overpriced, costs more than a cinema ticket. Or buying physical media, but then you have to pay the physical distribution costs, keep around shiny plastic donuts and specialized machinery.
---
And besides, I'm still not sold on algorithmic recommendations, and watch things mostly based on meatspace recommendations.
Subscription services have one simple goal: provide just enough value to keep one from cancelling their subscription. There is no real incentive to do better if all the competitors have the same goal and behaviour, which is the current situation. So they raise the prices a little bit, skip on user-motivated UX, and double down on mediocre "just good enough to idly waste time on" content, and slowly bring down the user expectations about content and how to find it, placing them in a "learned helplessness" state of not being arsed to find what they like themselves.
There were also multiple claims of them doing cryptomining on your device.
It looks like I was too late and it had left their catalogue again, but anything I found on the internet was either "look at this nice show available on Netflix" (posted 2 years ago) or, very very rarely, a Netflix page with a grayed out play button. Again, no explanation.
It was the first time in a long while I had opened it and also the last.
Their desktop app used to have a "search bar" in their Home -view which is now moved to a separate "Search" -view, which is.. one of the most annoying things ever.
I used to boot up Spotify, hit ctrl+f, type the playlist or artist I was looking for and click.
Now it's just a mess.
1/5
edit: remove curse words
Try using Apple Music. That shit is 5 years behind Spotify in any UX measure.
https://github.com/jpochyla/psst
I started slowly moving myself away from online streaming services for my daily listening. I ripped all my CDs (to FLAC so I can re-encode to whatever I want in the future) and started buying albums from new artists off of Bandcamp, 7digital and HDTracks. I've even bought a few new CDs from local record stores and ripped them. I still use streaming services for discovery but I'm moving back to blogs (Pitchfork, Stereogum, etc), aggregators (Anydecentmusic) and forums for more of that discovery.
F2K is at https://www.foobar2000.org/, it works just as well as ever, and, yes, still has that tattoo. I’m happily using the Mac version on Big Sur.
I have the same issue, just with YouTube Music (regardless of platform). Other applications I cannot figure out how to navigate includes Slack and Snapchat. Snapchat is on the phone, of cause, but sometimes I just need to exit the app, because I can't figure out how to get back. Slack... I just don't know, it looks like one of those crazy Chinese chat application that does EVERYTHING, or a Japanese newspaper.
Installing and using a Linux desktop 25 years ago was easier than using some of these applications.
Are you on iOS? IIRC it doesn't have a back button/gesture, unlike Android, and that's the only way that makes sense to me, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.
Regarding Slack, maybe it's different on iOS, but it looks relatively straightforward - on login you get the list of channels and DMs, you can click on one, and then go back with a button next to the channel name, which does a left to right animation which implies you can just swipe left-right for that thing. What else is there? Long press for message details/options is the same across many messaging apps.
I never used Slack on iOS, it might be better than on the desktop. The desktop application doesn't use as many resources as the internet had led me to believe, so that's nice, but the interface as WAAAY too busy to be effective as a communications platform. I still miss HipChat, and while it has its own set of problem, I honestly think I prefer the train wreck that is Google Chat.
That's why Spotify uses tiles instead of tables. The tiles are important for the content producer, not for the Spotify user. A tile can scream at you 'Listen to me!', a row in a table cannot do this.
It shows that Spotify is making more money from content creators than content consumers.
I realize these things probably have commercial implications, but goddamn it feels good to rant.
Spotify has 2 types of users, the creator and consumer. As long as there is more money to be made from the creator user they will also A/B test for that user.
Ive mentioned it before but their mobile design sucks. I use it a lot in my car, so usually ill keep the playback screen open amd just swipe when I need to change songs, simple and probably safe. But if I swipe ever so slightly upward, it opens the lyrics function, so I have to look down, see what happened, swipe, then get back to driving. I get im not using it the way it is "supposed" to be used, but its an akward design choice anyways. When are the lyrics that on the fly important, and even when im looking at the screen I still mess it up.
That and the issues ive been having with the desktop app. Maybe its just my hardware but it never seems to just open om the first try, I usually have to close, then reopen it.
So you click one, and what does it do? It downloads the whole book then drops you in at whatever page you last read, then hides the book title and author.
Unless you can recognize the cover photo (which changes to match the latest edition), there is really no way to know what you're going to get except to guess.
You can switch to list view in the “⇵” menu (at least on iOS).
Finding what I want can be very difficult if the text isn’t clearly visible in the cover art or if it’s not art I’m very familiar with.
Even the fact that it’s sorted A-Z doesn’t help because it often sorts titles starting with “The” under “T”. Sigh.
UI designers: just give me a list view option. Please.
The search manages to show the album art, title, artist and type ( song or album, and it's grouped by song, album, artist).
And of course there's the added bonus that it comes with a YouTube Premium subscription, so i get good music UI + no YouTube ads + YouTube mobile app downloads.
It's even more apparent on Netflix where the UI has got progressively worse over the years to the point it's basically unusable to discover stuff you actually want to see - I mean, large rows of "you watched this already, here it is again".
If and when Apple Music introduces a Duo equivalent tariff I will jump ship, for many reasons but a significant one is that I use Spotify exclusively for music yet it’s UI takes up a significant amount of premium space for podcasts. Apple had seen the light and spun off podcasts to a separate app from music.
I’d honest rather go back to buying the albums.
The only reason I still use it is because I need a music discovery service that takes gift cards and has an offline mode. But guess what? On my last flight there was some error on Spotify's servers and even my local songs in offline mode stopped working.
I do my best to support Spotify seeing as it is one of the few tech platforms not controlled by the usual suspects. But they are making it really hard for me.
I don't particularly like what Apple Music has become, when compared to the iTunes from the music-only era, but it's still dramatically better than Spotify.
Local audio files for me, please.
It will allow you to sort Spotify playlists by a number of hidden variables like BPM and year of release. You can also export/copy paste the tables that it generates in the process.
Not perfect and might not fit your exact use case, but wanted to let HN know.
What I can't figure out is why TF can't we disable the autoplay on YouTube playlists.
This might even include genres that I wouldn't think to look in. I'm very picky about music, but it's across most genres so far. I can't really rule anything out... Even foreign music. `Alors En Danse` comes to mind quickly.
I feel like i look like a neoludite but honestly, it's just better.
Side note…I believe that all music apps are _fated_ to irritating mediocrity.
iTunes was once perfect, and grew unusable. Spotify was perfect in 2019 and is trending toward usability issues as well.
This killed me lol. Very true. Thanks for the write-up.
I left Spotify after a few years of using it and currently am trying Tidal because they pay the artists more apparently? Sadly, however, they're guilty of the same UX problems.
My most recent, frustrating bug is setting an album or podcast to be available offline and then having to wait 30 seconds to 1 minute for the iOS app to give up on finding the network while in airplane mode.
Like another top comment mentions, there seems to be no cohesive vision.
If a true competitor ever emerges, I’m happy to jump ship. I enjoy the subscription experience a lot.
p.s. - I never want ads or popups for new album drops. I’d take a “feed” with search available over whatever “Home” is.
A decent number of people use this, which I think indicates some clear gaps in Spotify’s basic display features. Luckily the Spotify API is very generous with the data they expose about artists.
It is a person who to a large extent gave up on strong personal preferences and is comfortable with algorithmic/business driven replacement.
Other times I just want to play on album, from start to finish, in order, and then stop. For some reason, Spotify has trouble with the last part - stopping. There are two autoplay options and I keep turning them off and Spotify keeps turning them back on.
This it how it looks like: https://imgur.com/sxXKG2s
Funny enough it's not documented, so let's see how long it will stick around for: https://support.spotify.com/kr-en/article/keyboard-shortcuts...
I miss the days of Apple Human Interface Design Guidelines that were actually based off scientific principles of human visual perception.
I think that's not true. Cover art / album art allows you to visually scan through a pile of different podcasts to find the one podcast you're looking for. E.g. "I know it's mostly purple with a little white, so now I'm scanning for purple… there it is." You can find the one you want even if the art is tiny and you can see 100 at a time.
Let's not allow the lesson to be "text is better, don't display cover art". Instead, let's allow the lesson to be "let me make the software work the way my brain does." It's not that Spotify has made a terrible decision, necessarily. It's just that their UI isn't optimized for a non-visual person, or a person who prefers text to images.
What if software had far more customizable UI, such that I can make the software display the information to me in the way that makes the most sense to me? Harder to test, for sure, but if they made it a paid feature (meaning only for paying users) it might pay for itself.
Pros: You can view almost everything as a list, although their UI is optimized for touch screens - so the rows are rather large. Their radio rivals Pandora in terms of properly understanding your tastes.
Cons: After a very quick look, I don't think they do podcasts. Their API support is utter shit, 3rd party clients aren't a possibility, and there is no Linux client. You have to use the their client for "master" quality (which isn't bit-perfect and is definitely snake oil).
Having tried Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Play, Pandora, and Qobuz, I have found that Tidal is comfortably the best.
Amazon Music is a very close second, but suffers from what I call the "Armin Effect". Armin van Buuren plays many genres of electronic music, and so inferior recommendation engines tend to connect this huge umbrella of genres through Armin. Your taste in music may not be affected by this problem. Tidal and Pandora are the only two services I have used that don't suffer from this.
That's a big pro. Podcasts and music don't belong together.
A good recommendation engine is important to me, so I'll check it out.
That said, Spotify could improve the UX.
For one thing, recommendations are fine but how about reduce the amount of lists. Let the user click something if they want recommendations based on feeling or genre or "more like x", etc.
To illustrate the previous point, when I open the app, there are these lists:
Your top mixes
Made for
Recently played
More like x
Your shows
Genre/feeling recommendation
Musiken att ha koll på
Genre recommendation
For today's drive (but WHY?)
More like y
More of what you like
Genre recommendation
Genre recommendation
Genre recommendation
Discover something new
New releases for you
Discover i
Discover j,
Genre again,
Genre.
Trying clicking Search, and then... scroll through and read 80 tiles, one by one, until you find the one you're looking for!
You can't sort the list.
It's not even in alphabetical order.
The ordering of the list changes based on unknown criteria.
It's comically bad UI/UX. If there was a sitcom about bad UX, this would be in the pilot episode.
Spotify has many teams working on the UI of their app, could be 100+ people, perhaps even hundreds. Isn't that absurd when the UI of any classic music/media player is superior?
It's incredibly annoying but haven't yet heard a compelling reason to switch to apple music.
I'd be interested to read more about it. Why in general the UX in a lot of apps has been dropping (for me).
It's like information density doesn't matter anymore.
There are good reasons Spotify does what Spotify does, some of which have already been mentioned in this thread. Instead of begging and groveling for them to change, why not change your habits to ones more beneficial to you? Spotify has never promised users freedom; they are simply a front-end to their collection of licensed music. Spotify has all the power in the relationship with their users and will perpetrate abuse on their users without hesitation or warning.
If you're on a freedom-respecting OS, I recommend either soulseekqt or any plain old BitTorrent client for music acquisition. I recommend mpd with ncmpcpp as a client for playing, and sending cash by mail to whoever you want. Remember, sharing is a virtue, not a vice.
That being said Spotify still somehow stands out as a case study in how not to design an interface. What's worse is that the mobile apps are specifically designed with electron under the assumption that it will make cross platform development easy...but it breaks on every device in different ways.
It's sad because I hate having to maintain a large music catalog manually but no music service really provides an adaquite solution to this and the system with the most extensive library is sadly...the worst platform for it. I hope they get better but I've been hoping that for years at this point.
Software becomes successful not because of how it looks, but because of how it helps humans in their daily lives. The current fad is form over function to the nth degree.
It’s just mind-boggling and creates some sort of anxiety during using the app.
Their API is pretty good and I've used it to build a PoC desktop client using JavaFX that works using simple table controls and local Sqlite caching so I can search/filter my playlist "library". The API even has playback controls and nowplaying support. Pretty much everything needed to build an alternative usable client.
The reason I did not continue with it and I'm still stuck with their desktop-(but-actually-web)-client is that the playback control API seems to be blocked by Sonos so I cannot use it to control my main listening devices.
I love Spotify as a service but their clients are horrible.
They just shove a bunch of music into a giant search engine and do some easily ignorable curation.
But their search works great, easy to play an album, good back catalog on Unlimited (I've been doing a lot of crate digging into the early 2000s using Wikipedia's album catgeory listings and my hit rate between the list and it being in Amazon is about 85%)
The API sucks, playlists have weird limits, their UI is atrocious ... but you can hear what you like, when you like, so I'm happy.
I use Apple Music for streaming / high quality downloads while on the go or airplaying around the house, and Roon (https://roonlabs.com) for dedicated in-home album listening. Its definitely a more expensive combo than Spotify, but worth it.
You can't customize any of these home screens. You can't tell them to STOP SHOWING ME PODCASTS I DON'T LISTEN TO PODCASTS. You can't reset your listening profile to get back to a vanilla experience (especially applicable if you use your account for multiple different things. I don't listen to the same music while working as I do while working out, or actual "just sit-and-listen to music" sessions, and I also use music for D&D sessions, so all my suggested music ends up being a terrible mishmash. Spotify's suggestion here is to pay for multiple accounts.
Even the AI and suggested music is wearing thin. Both Spotify and Deezer just give me the same exact tracks constantly, 99% of it is very mainstream, well-known stuff, and I haven't discovered any new music in over a month, despite listening for at least 4 hours a day. I kind of want to go back to just pirating everything again. It's actually pathetic that these top-of-the-line services offer less flexibility, power, and control than just pirating music and sticking it on your PMP did 15 years ago. It's sad.
At least Bandcamp is still a thing, but then I've got an annoying library split. I can't mix my bought Bandcamp tracks in with Deezer or Spotify.
Why are these the options? Pay out the nose for music (if you're a serious listener, $150 gets you 10 albums, which I can get through in three days). Be a criminal. Pay for a subscription that gives you no control and sells you to advertisers.
I'm still not sure if those users use spotify this way because the ui is so bad or if the ui is molded towards those users...
The post complained about album art for podcasts, i bet that's more of a symptom of Spotify slapping Podcast support over what has already been created for music.
It gives you just such a list.
I can search and get a list, I can sort within that list by whatever I want, I can create a "smart playlist" for "100 tracks, with more than 5 plays that were last played more than 3 months ago". There's also a "shuffle albums" feature that I didn't realize I missed from iTunes. You can also add a tidal subscription within plex, but it's a little clunky so I just stick to my library.
I added a +1 to the "Play Next" community feature request [0]. Not sure if one exists for the queue clearing behavior, but I would definitely +1 that too if I found it.
[0] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Queue-Queue-to...
Also this UI / UX issue isn't just a problem with Spotify but iTunes (Apple Music) to! So I guess it's just a general trend that started for no good reason.
In iTunes, the table view is now only for the main page, and has been gone from the search and the playlist pages. It's so inconsistent. You get the nice old-school table view when you're on default but then when on the search page they display it on grid view. On the playlist page, you're like on this weird half-table half-grid view.
It took about ca. 2-3 years for them to get to a state where you click on a song and it plays it. With no long delay, no stutter, ability to skip into a specific spot, almost no crash. With still no decent playlist support (2-3 years more work to develop this cutting edge revolutionary concept to an entry level), but it was enough to switch for HiFi quality. Since then there was a tiny addition to playlists, fairly usefule if you now where the traps are, but they did a bunch of making it flashy and big, with very limited advancement on functionality. In fact, basic functionality got f..d up here and there! Drag and drop makes random things, search bar jumps all over the place, album/playlist info only visible topmost or much scrolled down position, in between just a big emty space. Which ironically can react to click! They introduced the invisible item gets clicked concept. Funny. : / Lists go to the very edge, visually cluttered navigation and item text, invisible title bar to drag (but click slightly elsewehere and it will start some song). And the most bloated search results, yes! They make it exceptionally hard to find what you need, in pair with Spotify. And the same kind of suggestions and trends and lists and whatnot, but your own favourites are pushed back somewhere. Their choices have the prime location not your own! How hostile is that?! (very!)
Looks like they hired the slowest working most incompetent UX/UI designers, turning the usability into an ever descending spiral.
But on the positive side.... well, nothig. It is huge, slow like f..k, bloated, a nighmare to use.
As soon as I pick up building an offline file cathalog again I will go back to the good old days of owning my songs and copying the file I want to have in the centre. This streaming kind of hostile nighmare is not for me. I am thinking about collecting my complaints into a post but it is a long work. And futile anyway. I tried to communicate problems with them but they do not listen. They try to change my behaviour first, also asking about things I already told them, seems like not even reading my mail in full. So likely will just go away while emitting little puffs of smoke through my ears.
I would prefer a toggle to flip between a list (ideally with sortable headers etc) and album art cover view though - not exactly super complex to resolve.
There are a couple of things when we search for something in a text box: We're pattern matching what we think their database contains. If the hysteresis between the search and the match is small, Album grid view might work. You have to know the cover art a-priori though. But if you are vaguely looking for something, list is far better.
On a serious note. If all you do is high intent searches (I know exactly the one song/podcast I want), Spotify is not for you. Spotify is about discovery. Stick to iTunes or Winamp or Kazaa or Youtube or anything else that just gives you a list of things. Don't make the product worse because you're using it for something it's not designed around.
Also quit the Spotify exceptionalism please. YouTube has a discovery algorithm that is as good, plus there's tons of niche music on YouTube that you will never find on Spotify, because it wouldn't be easy to get a deal to have it on the platform (royalties blabla)
How does anyone serious about music use it? Did I somehow miss that spotify is only intended for casual, "I'll listen to whatever"-type users?
No, you can't. This is a for-profit service, and a table of songs interferes with their ability to choose what you listen to, and prefer certain artists or songs over others. I would not expect a high-quality music library interface from any cloud provider, because the intent is to stream you the things they prefer, and not empower you.
Why do people couch their interactions with big tech as if they matter? What are you going to do, NOT use Spotify? Fat chance.
Slightly disagree with this. When you're searching for something whose cover art you know well, the visual match is definitely the fastest way for you to get to it.
Truncating the title/track info on the other hand, I agree is pretty unforgivable.
Sometimes I think there are companies and apps that would benefit from firing their entire UX/UI teams wholesale and then slowly rehiring a portion of them as actual problems crop up from their absence. A reset to this A/B madness of sorts.
Because even though you pay for the subscription, they are still getting paid to promote artists, albums, and tracks while also trying to keep you on the platform for more time by offering playlists made by themselves (more opportunity to promote) or other users.
I just want to search some songs and play them.
I tried out Pandora one night when it first came out while I was in college in 2004/2005. Then it was “someone made an algorithm that can pick music for you!” After about 15 minutes I lost interest “Hm that’s neat, I’m good though I know what I like”
Fast forward 17 years and you have these multibillion dollar companies everyone loves and hates, controversies. I never saw the appeal in the first place.
I listen to a lot of new wave retro and lesser known prog/prog metal and it's all on there anyway.
"No."
I could go on...
Slightly off topic but.. couldn’t resist
Are you new to internet drama? People use it to feel high and mighty for a couple weeks and get some sweet, sweet dopamine hits, and then they go back to doing exactly what they were doing before.
Hard to advertise in a functional list grid, but yeah like fuck, I’m right there with you. It’s to the point where I’d rather just steal the album off of YouTube. At least there’s an ad-blocker.
The market has been distorted by VCs and investors who are willing to throw shit tons of money towards anything that "grows" and generates engagement. This pulled the ground out of the model of making products that people pay for - you would make money money (off investors) if you just give away your product than if you make people pay for it. That's how we ended up in the current situation, and there are tons of vested interests (people's entire careers are built on this) in perpetuating the problem even if the system can't ever be sustainable.
The music has to stop at some point though when everything is saturated by advertising. That appears to be now given the current, massive downturn. Investor money is no longer free or easy to come by, so the pendulum will have to swing back to making products funded by its end-customers.
Maybe the advertised products will all be opportunities to make money. Occasionally job listings, mostly crypto coins.
Sure, but can't they make the functional layout version optional?
I 100% agree with this, and I find myself increasingly hating software the worse the UX is.
I was in visual studio the other day, and wanted to view the properties of the project on the settings page, so I open it up trying to view it, which immediately and automatically without any input from me fired some sort of event off that modified the settings and completely broke the project.