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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

I am mostly confused by what the author thinks the selling point is.

> I can’t describe what a breath of fresh air this is compared to how bad modern smartphone music and streaming apps have become.

Well, I was hoping they would try to describe it, because personally, I would have to wear my most deeply shaded nostalgia glasses to think that MP3 player UX has ever been comparable to what Spotify offers nowadays.

And we can not even directly compare a MP3 player to Spotify, which is paid to do an entirely different and way more complicated job, considering that you are able to browse and organize a completely different and incomparably larger (and automatically growing) set of media.

In the end, this feels like a case of someone convincing themselves of a peculiar diet, where the believe in its effectiveness does all the heavy lifting. Which is great, when it works for that person – but probably not applicable in general and likely worse than the market solution.

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> MP3 player UX has ever been comparable to what Spotify offers nowadays.

You might have different experiences to me.

My iPod was never a distraction whilst driving in the way that Spotify, with it's manifold failure modes and inconsistent/unresponsive UX, can be.

With depressing regularity I drive without either music or podcasts because that's preferable to dying (or killing someone else) in a car crash because I'm fussing with Spotify after it's crapped out in some weird way yet again.

Again, not a problem I ever had with my iPod. I know they do crash occasionally - happened to a friend - but I can't remember a single incident in the 7 - 8 years I used mine regularly (multiple hours, every day) where it crashed.

Spotify is terrible software to the point of being dangerous. I can't see how that is desirable UX.

> You might have different experiences to me.

Definitely.

Your experience does sound demoralizing. I am not sure I have had Spotify crash on me thus far and certainly not with any regularity. I think it's safe to assume that you have an untypically bad experience, because if what you described was true for most people, Spotify would have no users.

Which begs the question, why do you stick to it? There are competing services. How could they possibly do a worse job, in light of what you are describing?

Spotify crashes on me quite a bit too but I stick with it because my kids like Spotify and we have a family subscription which is a pretty good deal. I really dislike the Spotify UI, especially the way podcasts are given so much screen space and it's something I have no interest in and can't figure out how to disable it.

I had free Apple Music for six months and I think it actually sounds better than Spotify (or at least I preferred it, I absolutely do not have audiophile ears) but I don't want to pay for a third music service (we also have Pandora because their radio stations are great) and my kids prefer Spotify.

I find Apple Music to be pretty good except in CarPlay where the features that ostensibly make driving safer make it more dangerous. If I'm parked, I have access to the whole collection. If I'm moving, there's a tiny fraction available, or I can use Siri to try to get what I want. If course, Siri is stuck on one language at a time and my collection has many, some of which I can't even pronounce. What could have been a quick scroll to find the album or artist I want becomes a frustrating experience in finding something acceptable for the mood.

I'll agree that people with early iPods had an easy time finding their music. If you truly love recommendation engines, that old style is not for you. But it would be nice to have the same interface on CarPlay for the rest of us.

> but probably not applicable in general and likely worse than the market solution.

Worse, for which usecase?

I as a musician like to listen to full albums (as opposed to single songs) I like to manually read up on music and then listen to that specific music from that specific world region and era. Spotify can be neat to discover some starting points for that search, but it is arguably shit at the listening experience I am looking for. For people who don't care so much about what is playing in the background it is certainly doing a good job tho.

I need to listen a lot to mixes and recordings as well, and an MP3 player certainly has an easier UX for that, than the typical phone - plug it in and copy over. How would you do that on spotify? I use a nextcloud sync setup, which works — but setting that up to work flawlessly with your audio-player app (e.g. poweramp) can be a bit tricky at times.

So yeah, Spotify ftw. if you convinced yourself of that peculiar diet, to use your words.

Having grown up in an era when cassette walkmans were new, then salivating over CD walkmans before building my own MP3 player in the mid-00's, I think smart phones are the best thing to happen to portable music.

Like yourself, I do also listen to full albums. You can do that on Spotify very easily. You can listen to recommendations (either via Spotify's own suggestion engine or curated playlists) of music from genre's, region, era, etc too. Sure you cannot add your own mixes to Spotify but the beauty of smart phones is that I can use a different app for that (and as an ex-DJ I really am into listing to DJ sets so I very much to use my phone in that capacity).

And this is really the point of the GPs comment. It wasn't that Spotify (specifically) replaces the need for a walkman but rather that smart phones support an array of more convenient ways to consume music with Spotify as one example. If you don't like Spotify then that's fine because we all have our own personal preferences. But you're not just limited to Spotify on a smart phone.

> Like yourself, I do also listen to full albums. You can do that on Spotify very easily

Can you load into Spotify a very specific recoding that's rarely available? I have a few CDs hard to source from rare live recordings.

If you just want to listen to background music, or a given song from a given bad, sure. If you want to listen to a specific recording that happened at a given date for which you have the CD, I don't think Spotify can do that.

> I think smart phones are the best thing to happen to portable music.

If they had hardware buttons, yes, but that's rarely found. Also, the DAC is rarely any good (less of a problem now that LDAC and AptXhd are becoming popular).

Are these hardware buttons and a good DAC worth $400 to $4000? Maybe not to you, but they are worth that for me.

> Can you load into Spotify a very specific recoding that's rarely available? I have a few CDs hard to source from rare live recordings.

Weirdly, yes you can. I stumbled across that option myself on the desktop client when search for a song that wasn’t in Spotify’s catalogue.

> If you just want to listen to background music, or a given song from a given bad, sure. If you want to listen to a specific recording that happened at a given date for which you have the CD, I don't think Spotify can do that.

It can, but you really don’t need to use Spotify if you don’t want to. I still keep Subsonic around for exactly this kind of scenario (and podcasts too). So I use Spotify for 90% of my listening but Subsonic for anything I’ve curated myself from physical media.

> If they had hardware buttons, yes, but that's rarely found.

All smart phone has hardware volume buttons. My Bluetooth earphones have hardware play and pause buttons. And the device we are comparing it against (the new Sony Walkman) is also touchscreen based like smart phones. So there isn’t really anything between modern Walkmans and smart phones these days.

> Are these hardware buttons and a good DAC worth $400 to $4000? Maybe not to you, but they are worth that for me.

You have no idea how much I’ve spent on audio hardware so please don’t assume I cheap out and don’t care about audio quality. In my home office alone I have an entire rack full of professional grade hardware. But I’m also pragmatic about what I buy. A £400 MP3 player isn’t going to sound any better than an iPhone when I’m listening to lossy music. The real differentiator there is what (ear|head)phones I use. However when I am sat at home my vinyl collection, I notice all the nuances of cheaper hardware much more.

> All smart phone has hardware volume buttons. My Bluetooth earphones have hardware play and pause buttons.

I don't care much about volume buttons - it's usually adjusted to what I think is right and rarely tweaked.

What I care about is buttons to control the tracks: there are no next/previous track and play button on the smartphones I tried.

> And the device we are comparing it against (the new Sony Walkman) is also touchscreen based like smart phones.

It also has actual hardware buttons.

> So there isn’t really anything between modern Walkmans and smart phones these days

Well, if you exclude the buttons I care about, yes.

> when I’m listening to lossy music

You do, but I don't!

> The real differentiator there is what (ear|head)phones

Agreed, it's often the limiting factors. I had played with FLAC files before but couldn't find much of a difference.

Now that I have proper headphones and earbuds, I do!! And it's actually why I'm waiting for proper neckbad earbuds to consider exercicing with music: just like I don't want to listen to lossy music, I don't want to be exposed to bad earbuds.

> Worse, for which usecase?

For most use cases.

> I as a musician like to listen to full albums [...]

How does Spotify prohibits you as a musician from listening to an album or reading up on music or looking at music from eras? I detect nothing in any of these tasks that Spotify would make harder than any of the alternativ ways I know of. If anything it should be easier, considering the considerable amount of meta information that resides in Spotify (for example finding music from a specific era or displaying lyrics) and that you don't have to gather yourself.

> How would you do that on spotify?

I wouldn't. I would use foobar for that, because that's the right tool for the job. I also try no get confused about what the job is, what the available tools are and which tool can replace which for a specific job.

Here's one reason: you can only have playlist of songs. There's no way to collapse songs of a single album to one entry. You might think it's a little change but it completely devastates the experience if you're someone who listens to whole albums.

That's not the only UX hurdle if you're someone who curates a library of things to listen to instead of engorging from an algorithm. Sure, you can follow albums and artists but since you can't organize them, these features gets useless if you have anything more than 100 items. The UI is in general is way too simple, with very sparse information density compared to your traditional music player. Was it because of necessity or style that all these previous tools opted for all these features Spotify shirks? I'll let you decide that.

> you can only have playlist of songs. There's no way to collapse songs of a single album to one entry.

You could add the whole albums to the playlist, one by one, and then play the playlist w/ shuffle disabled. This last bit makes it a limited workaround, however.

On the other hand, Spotify API could allow to implement the custom solution to shuffle these, similar to https://spotifyshuffler.com/, if you have enough skills, time, and determination to do that.

I'm not using the playlists as a list of songs to listen to in one session. These are issues that come to the fore when you start using them as an organizational primitive. It's more limited than you think in that sense. For example, let's say I have a 20 album playlist. A very usual affair for me as I compile a single playlist for one month or a season. 20 albums comes around at 200 files. That's an ungodly amount of scrolling right there. (my seasonal/monthly actually average around 50 albums). Now imagine how painful it'd be for my long running playlists with hundreds or even that one playlist of mine with thousands of albums?

One workaround that I and other users make use of is to just add the first track of albums as links to the albums themselves. It's whatever. It's a bit stupid this is something I have to fucking deal with in the biggest music interface that the planet makes use of. Anyways, I mainly mentioned that as example of the ethos of Spotify UI/UX and what kinds of user they're primarily catering to. I guess I'm in the excluded group in this implementation of "worse-is-better" or something. (Is there a term for that group? Power user can't cover it because people with disabilities are usually in it.)

I don't remember any of the MP3 players desperately trying to shove podcast down my throat instead of showing my music. They also never lost all my downloaded music in the first 30 minutes of an 11 hour flight due to a crash bug.

So just in those simple ways Spotify is worse.

I've encountered plenty of bugs with portable music players. I've had CD walkman scratch disks, cassette players eat tapes and I've had SD and compact flash storage fail on me too. No technology is beyond failure.

A CD getting scratched isn't really a bug, it's a limitation of that technology and form factor. Is there anybody on earth that didn't scratch up at least a few accidentally?

It is a bug when the battery compartment is inside CD tray so if the battery flap isn’t shut flush you end up with damaged discs. This isnt normal operation of CD players, it’s a problem with the design of the unit.

That said, it was still one of my favourite portable music players because it sounded amazing and supported MP3 CDs too.

> And we can not even directly compare a MP3 player to Spotify, which is paid to do an entirely different and way more complicated job, considering that you are able to browse and organize a completely different and incomparably larger (and automatically growing) set of media.

Spotify has two drawbacks though: you need a constant Internet connection and it removes tracks at will. The constant internet connection can be solved by downloading media to the device, but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing. This is the reason I keep buying CDs. Spotify is an amazing tool to listen on the go but whenever I feel a real connection (no pun intended) with an artist's music, I have to buy their art in a physical format.

> The constant internet connection can be solved by downloading media to the device,

Well, you'd think so, but I've had albums which I had downloaded disappear if I hadn't listened to them for a while.

So the "download" isn't really stable.

There is a maximum of five offline devices per account which used to be enforced manually (i.e. you had to make a conscious choice of which device to kick out if you wanted to add a new one), but it's now managed automatically on a least-recently-used basis. Maybe this is what you're running into?

> but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing.

Blame the copyright holders aka the Big Four/Big Five: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry

Streaming services would gladly stream anything you want to you.

That is still a downside of the system. Even when there is some external force at play. The BigFour/Big Five don't come into your house to take away your CDs.

Who is to blame is irrelevant.

Nah, I'll just blame Spotify.

There are services that let you download to your local storage, whatever you buy from them. Bandcamp is the obvious example, but in the past there was eMusic and even iTunes. Spotify could do it, but they just don't want to. How else are they going to help themselves to your wallet every month?

Sure streaming services want to give me anything I desire...anyhting except allow me to download an audio file that I can keep on my system. Then I wouldn't have to give a crap about whether Spotify still had the rights to it.

> I am mostly confused by what the author thinks the selling point is.

-------------------

From the article:

> You don’t need to use any special desktop software; you mount the Walkman as a USB storage device and transfer files. Wait… that’s it? Yes!

>The player indexes any music you add, but keeps the files in place. This lets me use rsync to regularly diff and copy new ripped CDs or downloaded tracks across, even on FreeBSD. It also decouples syncing from music organising, so no more finagling iTunes in Wine, or using the garbage new macOS Music.app. As a (diagnosed) OCD suffer, this literally makes me happier than it should.

----------

These are features I had in my MP3 player about the time the first iPod came out (looked like a thumbdrive with a couple of buttons and a 2-line LCD screen on its side). Features I highly prefer, along with the fact that no internet connection is required at any time. I'm not looking for a device to be the front end for Spotify, Apple, or any other service - just an MP3 player that lets me play podcasts, music, lectures, etc. - e.g., any audio file that I want to, ideally in most of the common audio formats (including ogg).

[Edited for format.]

In terms of UX, it's really hard to beat high fidelity audio and hardware buttons. Spotify is just an app. The real experience is the playback.

Hardware buttons I agree with. But the Sony NW-A55 Walkman we are comparing against requires constant touchscreen interaction too so it's not really any better than a smart phone. Plus most phones have hardware buttons for volume anyway.

As for high fidelity audio, I doubt there is much between devices these days. I remember back when I was buying portable cassette and, later, CD players there did used to be a real noticeable difference between the audio fidelity of different brands (ironically with Sony often cashing in on their brand and than having worse fidelity than hardware from significantly cheaper competitors). However these days everyone is listening to lossy compression over bluetooth so there isn't really going to be much room for the host hardware to improve. As always, the headphones you use will make much more of an impact.

I like to keep music playback separate from my phone because I hate having it interrupted by some random app notification. And on my smartphone I have to push the volume to the max to barely reach the level I consider normal with my headphones. On the Walkman that's not an issue and the difference in sound is immediately noticeable. Of course that doesn't matter if you use Bluetooth, but as there isn't a single decent pair of BT headphones with replaceable batteries on the market I'll keep using cables in the foreseeable future (and headphones have a minimum size, so the manufacturers can't even use their typical excuses for using glue).

Of course some phones are quite solid in terms of sound, with some music there's no difference either way, but without comparison you can't really know what's missing unfortunately.

I have done comparisons. :) It used to be that the key differentiator was a hardware's DAC but I can't say I've noticed that much difference in the last 10 years. Even a cheap Chinese phone I used for a bit sounded equivalent. And that was before I switched to bluetooth.

I do really notice the difference on non-portable hardware though. I have used a bunch of different USB devices and they vary wildly. I have 4 amplifiers and several audio switching boxed rack mounted right next to me (they power 9 speakers, 2 CRT TVs, 4 LCD monitors and a projector :D).

The ability of such players to be operated blindly, and to give audio feedback on operations, is a major advantage. Then also the pocketability, compared to today’s huge phones. Lastly, being distraction-free because they are dedicated to sound file playback. No internet, no ads, no hit-and-miss recommendations, no connection issues. Just play what you know you have and like. It’s a simpler life where you have full control.

> Well, I was hoping they would try to describe it, because personally, I would have to wear my most deeply shaded nostalgia glasses to

Leaving aside the UI issues (most of which can be alleviated with hardware buttons having tactile indicators like bumps / different sizes etc), my core concern is you are leaving not just the preservation job (prey none of the albums/songs gets deleted after an IP right renegotiation) but the curation job to Spotify.

I don't want that. Curation is the most important thing even. I carefully select the albums I want to listen to. I don't ever want software to try to guess my tastes or fill in the blanks when the playlist is over.

It might be good for Spotify as they can show better stats (more tracks listened to, more engagement, whatever) but it's not for me as I'd rather have audio stop to let me take another decision about what I want to listen to: I care about my own experience much more than Spotify might.

Spotify has an opportunity here to sell a hi quality portable player with a good DAC and headphones amp.

It's obviously a niche product, but if they started streaming in FLAC and paired it with their own audiophile player, it would be a fantastic marketing stunt they would probably turn a profit by selling the devices. God knows what audiophiles do to be able to listen to audio on the go with a good DAC and amp.

I want to listen to my music, the music I've bought, not what spotify throws at me. I'm currently using Youtube Music because it at least lets me store and play my music collection, even though it tries to push me toward the streaming options.

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