I just started Spotify with a stopwatch:
2:26 for the main Browse to completely render
2:42 for the live search window to give suggestions
2:52 (+10 seconds) for the search to return a result
I once thought it was because of the massive local library that had to be loaded and sorted into Spotify, but I've done away with local files to try to speed up the start up. The results on my laptop are not any better. Maybe it's because I've been updating the same client since 2012?
Are you on a mechanical hard drive perhaps?
The network performance though is quite bad, searching for some song often fails or just is very slow to load and render.
Similar criticisms have been made of iTunes over the years (though I find it's not bad in the current version). Things like laggy scrolling are a bit understandable there, since they've defaulted to the grid of album covers view for a while. But Spotify looks like it's all just columns of text and a few thumbnails on the side?
I'm a recent convert from grooveshark, so I've been using the spotlight web player and I find it a pretty nice web app to be honest. I haven't dealt with any of the actual desktop clients yet, so don't know if anything I said above is true.
From a users perspective, that is an implementation detail and doesn't matter. A users only cares if his music player feels slow or not.
"We decided to develop it on HTML and JS" is a lame excuse for slow mobile apps, and IMO it's even worse on desktop.
Related: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/
"Oh, you've.. you've redesigned? Yeah no — it's.. it's kind of dark don't you think? ... no-no, I like it honey."
"Playlist-search isn't there anymore? Oh, ok.. :|"
"Hey, some of my songs aren't playing anymore, do you know anything about that? No.. ?"
"My offline-playlist is showing me a spinner instead of playing.. sigh, no it's fine, I'll just dig up my old mp3's in the garage."
At this point I'm seriously considering a divorce.
Why do they care if I spend more or less time in the app if I'm a premium user, surely that can't be the reason for this regression.
As for aero tiles... That's a Win8 thing? I guess it's a valid complaint. I think you can set global keyboard shortcuts for those actions, if that helps.
Foobar is classic to the cost of UX. We've figured out for a long time now bigger buttons are important, there's no need for separate pause/play especially if stop is right there.
It doesn't need a slew of crappy gradients and fancy shit, Just drag the interface forward a decade that's all. Usable with a touch screen should be a minimum now.
When I went from win -> nix so many years, all I wanted was a music player with the interface that of winamp2. xmms gave that and I was happy.
But then I discovered mpd+ncmpcpp. Really great if you have large music collections, have been using it since.
I'll try XMMS, I have tried it before but it never "clicked". I'll give it another shot, thanks!
You see, I was a very avid fan of winamp(2) about 10 years ago. Nothing else came close. Then onto linux, xmms did the trick (as all I needed was a winamp2 replacement). Then as my collection grew, my priorities change, I was after speed. So mpd was thing. In the past few years I haven't had a personal collection, now it's more often listening to music on grooveshark/youtube. After grooveshark went down, I got spotify (paid subscription), and I find myself being _stunned_ how bad, how slow, how ugly, how anti-UX it is. I think I may go back to having the collection on my HDD once again with mpd as that is still really fast. But that'll be difficult, as I'm often on the go and want to listen to stuff on my cell phone (where spotify is okay actually).
Though this is on Ubuntu, and Spotify is still a beta app on that platform last I checked. I don't think I've had this problem on Windows.
Or maybe just use the Clementine add on?
My keyboard has media keys, but I thought I would prefer short textual commands to having to move my hand to the upper right of my keyboard (and probably miss the key if I wasn't looking?).
The Windows experience is the same if the window is from an application that is running in the systray. In that case clicking the X closes the last window but leaves the application running.
I think daheza was saying that the removal of the systray caused the same actions (closing a window) to no longer do the same thing (get this window out of my way, but keep playing music) across operating systems when they used to in the past.
The spotify mobile app has some odd behavior from time to time. The UI will continue to respond to my actions but nothing actually happens for 20 seconds, during that time i'll click on several different songs attempting to get them to play.
Finally, for whatever reason, the app springs back to life an begins to execute the actions out of some sort of queue leading to several songs playing. It seemed very odd to queue song plays in such manner. I would've assumed it would be last one wins rather than "Song 1" - play for 2 seconds "Song 2" - Play for 2 seconds "Song 3" - play for 2 seconds
I may have clicked "Play song 2" 15 seconds ago before the song is actually played.
Overall, I love spotify though. I use it everywhere.
Luckily there is a way to downgrade to the earlier version: http://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/2y239w/a_guide_to_d... (The second method works for me)
On the good side, since all the webviews are right there in the app as renamed zip files, I suppose they could easily be edited to cut out some of the bottlenecks?
It may very well be the ads responsible for at least a memory leak in my case.
Developer vs computer time trade-off works only when software already works reasonably well. Which is not the case.
The thing that hadn't changed is humans - it was and it's still acceptable for an application to take a second or another to load.
Technical details had changed, but I can't really judge if those changes were drastically innovative or we're just redoing the same shit over and over, and can't tell if world has gone better or worse. I guess such judgements are highly subjective.
That resulted in a big performance boost, at least on my Core i7 MacBook Pro. With older machines I can guess that the performance might still not be that good.
However, this refresh also removed the ability to filter the playlist content view (cmd+F). The worst part of losing that feature is trying to find stuff in "Local Files". Very awkward.
which is pretty much a giant fucking failure for a mobile app that's used by people in the car, bluetooth, people on the go, etc.
i wish i could say mobile itunes stayed useable, but it didn't either. we're basically choosing from the worst of the best, these days.