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Comment by rez9x | Hacker News Reader

I recently left Spotify for Apple Music, in large part because of this new development path. I don't want podcasts, audiobooks, etc mixed in with my music. I prefer separate apps.

I think what bothered me more was the focus on branching into these new paths without any innovation in the music department--I'm sure there was innovation that wasn't visible to me. I'm tired of the same black and green color scheme. I don't like that I don't have a 'Library' and everything just goes in liked or a playlist.

I think their expansion into other media was a signal to me to look for someone doing a better job at specializing.

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> I don't like that I don't have a 'Library' and everything just goes in liked or a playlist.

I left Spotify a while ago, but one thing I hate is that there's no way of differentiating when you add complete albums to your collection vs only one song.

Same here, plus the constant house ads. It seemed like every time i opened the App I had to close some banner ad for a new feature/record/whatever.

This is precisely why I also switched to Apple Music, it was annoying to have Spotify constantly pushing podcast content to me as someone who had no interest in Podcasts and no way to enable a "music only" mode either.

I switched to Apple Music for exactly the same reason.

I too recently left Spotify for Apple Music because it works better on my Home Pod and Apple TV. I don't know why Spotify doesn't fix this. I know they are in a feud with Apple and maybe they think this is a way to apply pressure to Apple, but the risk is they lose people like me.

There were other reasons for leaving. I don't like that I can't hide or disable audiobooks or podcasts. They take up a lot of important screen space and are useless to me. I also really dislike the notifications from Spotify. I have them all turned off, but ever once in a while they decide to show one anyway.

frequently apple has non official api they use for inhouse apps that provide better interfacing with hardware

What I found thoroughly missing in all music streaming was emotional composition, aka the Algo being able to play music tailored to what situations I I'm experiencing and giving it an arc.

Example:im programming and the concentration music goes towards a victorious crescendo once it works.

Part of my dev process at work involves running a (rather) flaky test suite on my laptop. The test suite takes several minutes to run, and it doesn't fail fast. No good for my short attention span.

I wrote a script which runs the test suite in a loop. When the tests fail, it plays horns.aiff (from The Price is Right). When the tests pass it plays the epic Champions League theme music.

The best part is, I can do other stuff while waiting for the flaky tests to pass, without having to remember to check the terminal they're running in. Audio cues are really great.

That’s me too. I disliked having podcasts in otherwise perfectly OK music app, and also Spotify’s efforts to rebrand ‘podcasts’ as something else than “mp3s on RSS”. But I was a paying customer for 10+ years so they had a good run.

Counter-anecdote, I like that Spotify hasn't changed, and if it changed significantly tomorrow, it might prompt me to look at competitors and decide afresh which music service to use.

I left spotify after reading their privacy policy and some news stories about how they plan to use your listening data to infer things about you and sell the results

Congrats! Now you get to experience the glory of the deque. Your days of being restricted to stack pushing are in the past.

That (deque) is actually one of my favorite features, and something that had tempted me in the past. I have to relearn some behavior on queue creation though. I'm use to just clicking play, rather than adding to queue, so I end up with a bunch of songs in queue that I didn't intend (because I played a song from a longer playlist to start).

There’s definitely some annoyances… the paramount one for me is actually the opposite of what you describe: I click on an item to simply play it and it makes me deal with a pop up asking me how it should interact with my queue, even when I have no queue at all! Just play the damned song, stop asking me questions.

Ugh… things like this make me wish we had just one FOSS music player with a paid backend. I’d comment out all the modals and get on with life.

Nothing is stopping you from donating to Navidrome development

As I understand it that is for listening to a library of personally owned material remotely? That's not really what I'm looking for. I appreciate the MAAS model, it's just the UI's that suck.

Lots and lots of FOSS music players use libspotify or can otherwise connect to your Spotify account.

Here's just one. It's BYO frontend. Last I knew, there were a bunch of them. https://mopidy.com/

Also look into mpd, the music playing daemon.

That's a good attempt, but I'd rather not run a server - if I'm paying for the service I'd like to have an API I can run/write a frontend against. And ideally I'd have the ability to listen to lossless music, not whatever encoding Spotify thinks I deserve.

Looking to do this - how did you migrate your playlists? Also my family was using my main Apple Music account - so I have to "clear out the new place" as I setup a family account for them.

I have migrated services couple of times and used Soundiz and Songshift. They miss few matches but overall gets the job done.

Not OP, but I used SongShift for iOS. Worked great.

I used Soundshift. You can pay ~$7 to have unlimited exporting or do playlists 200 at a time for free.

Umm, what? There’s been plenty of innovation…

The new cover videos bands can post on songs are ill. The changing of the like button to not be just for liked songs is great (usually, tho sometimes I wish it was two separate buttons). There’s constantly a bunch of new tools to find new music, some hitting better than others. The “listen with friends,” while still buggy asf, is a great feature.

5 years ago, Spotify updates were more like “we changed the colors and layout of the UI and that’s about it.”

It’s true though. They haven’t reinvented music completely.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with the Like/Love button. It seems to be the same as it ever was for me, except the UI is different based on whether you're in CarPlay, mobile app, or desktop app, so sometimes it's a heart and sometimes it's a plus sign.

One of my biggest complaints for Spotify is the removal of star ratings, but that's been probably a decade ago at this point. Apple Music has it for the desktop app, but it's missing from mobile.

Buying music, downloading it and putting it into your music folder also works great! Then you can organize it, display it, order it and listen to it however you want by using a player that suits your preferences, decoupling the source of your music from the application you use to play it.

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