The recent removal of the system tray icon is anti-user. It provided users with easy access to Play/Pause from the system tray, but that meant users spent less time in the app, so the system tray icon was removed completely.
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.
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).
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.
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.