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How bad is your Spotify?

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Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#551

Post by konart »

gfxgirl wrote: post #517
kick_in_the_dro wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify is great, people on HN like to complain. Aside from having nearly any artist's catalogue available for almost free, their recommendations have helped me find a lot of great songs. I don't personally listen to the curated playlists but many of my friends love them.

Spotify objectively sucks compared to plenty of other services. Is it possible you haven't tried those other services? Having access to lots of music is certainly better than not but we've had services that do that since the early 2000s. I subscribed to Rhapsody in 2004. It gave me access to "nearly any artist's catalogue available for almost free". As 2 examples of things it did better, instead of using a shitty rec…

>Spotify objectively sucks compared to plenty of other services. Is it possible you haven't tried those other services?

It's just your personal experience that is different. Same for the other guy, same for me.

I've been on a paid accounts for Apple Music, Google Music, Yandex Music and even Youtube's adhoc solution for music. At least 1 year each (almost for entire time since the launch of Yandex music).

Spotify beats them all. Both recommendations and content (though we have to agree that content part can vary based on your location). Never had a chance to try Rhapsody.

>that when I pick some electro swing band it recommends death metal

That's how Google Music worked for me though, not Spotify.

Yandex had best UI but worst recommendation system (and lack of content).

Apple's recommendations are about as bad as Google's. Better UI but again - did not have music I wanted.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#552

Post by raindropm »

1_player wrote: post #231
etherio wrote: post #7

This is hilarious... > You are 26% basic. You're trying to be cool with Kapitan Korsakov, but your favorites are the same as everybody else's.. > Your spotify was please-read-my-manuscript-walmart-hawaiian-shirt-sitting-alone-in-the-cafeteria bad. Ouch. Really interesting project by all means. I hope they release the source - I'm curious about how it was built. Edit: This same link was posted 11 hours ago https://new…

> You are 5% basic. Talpa and Villagers of Ioannina City? Where do you even find this shit?. > You're stuck in the early 2010s. You must have peaked right around Ratatat's Magnifique. The last line is definitely something I will mention to my therapist ... :-) Still, it validated my hipster taste, even though it made fun of it. Suck it bot, I'm cool and your programmers aren't.

Gosh I love Ratatat’s Magnifique.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#553

Post by will_pseudonym »

arp242 wrote: post #549
will_pseudonym wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

foobar2k wins again ;)

Does it have this ability out of the box? I don't remember it being there years ago (I looked for it), but that was 3+ years ago. It's still the best music player I know of though, even when running with Wine on Linux.

AFAIK, I didn't have to add any plugins to achieve that feature. I believe you can set the order to be Shuffle Tracks or Shuffle Albums out of the box, but I might be misremembering if I needed to do anything for that to be there.

see: https://i.imgur.com/zL0oZsx.png

You can customize this feature in Advanced Preferences. Then, go to Playback -> Shuffle -> Album grouping pattern.

See: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=113035.0

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#554

Post by longnguyen »

> Finding a lot of Super Simple Songs.

> Like... a LOT.

> Your spotify was moms-spaghetti-movie-soundtrack-baby-shark-prison bad.

> Thank your obsessions with Eminem, soundtrack (e.g., Hans Zimmer and Two Steps from Hell), and Baby Shark for that.

LOL my kids used my spotify a lot...

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#555

Post by flobosg »

arp242 wrote: post #508
Alupis wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm dumbfounded people still put up with this mess on Spotify. Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior to Spotify - yet, everyone still seems to use Spotify none-the-less. Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-…

> Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing That's exactly what I'm not looking for; I'm perfectly fine with making my own music choices. I know what I like, have an extensive "library" on Spotify, and play from just that. The biggest thing I'm missing from Spotify (or indeed, most players, except the one I wrote myself years ago) is the ability to say "play random album fro…

> "play random album from my collection"

Quod Libet (https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) lets you do exactly that.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#556

Post by sundvor »

tyrust wrote: post #531
colinmhayes wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube's organization of music is horrible. It clearly wasn't made for listening to music.

I assume they were talking about Youtube Music ( https://music.youtube.com/ ), which is made for listening to music.

Yes, thanks.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#557

Post by Yizahi »

Alupis wrote: post #475
mike_d wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify won the same way Dropbox and Slack did. They didn't invent anything magical, they just had a client for every platform that worked when people tried it. Like web apps? Here you go. Linux nerd? Here is a deb repo. Have a smartphone? Cool, we don't care what kind. Even now I googled "Pandora windows app", clicked a few times, and ended up on some Microsoft Store page. Interestingly enough if I add "mac" to my s…

What's wrong with Pandora in the web browser?

If it's like YTM in browser then no control with keyboard keys.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#558

Post by thaumasiotes »

Alupis wrote: post #437
t0mbstone wrote: post #252

As someone who listens to spotify all day while programming, here's my secret to success: I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words), and I seed it with at least 10 songs. Then, I go down to the "Recommended Songs" section and I just play whatever it recommends. If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard. The vast majority of what it recom…

I'm dumbfounded people still put up with this mess on Spotify. Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior to Spotify - yet, everyone still seems to use Spotify none-the-less. Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-…

> Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-less bolted on these features later in the product life... and it shows.

Pandora wants to get rid of those features. All their advertising now is "if you pay for a premium account, you can play whatever music you want, on demand".

This reminds me really strongly of how eBay decided that (1) customers prefer to buy things at a fixed price [completely correct]; so that (2) they should try to prevent people from listing ordinary auctions, because customers don't like those. [No!] Instead, the goal was to just be the place where people would go if they wanted to buy something online.

Except of course that that completely undermines the concept of eBay. They were an established auction site that intentionally drove auctions away. And then they complained that people preferred to buy things from Amazon.

In both cases, it looks like a popular company with an established brand sees a rival that's even more popular, and concludes that the only path forward must be to implement features the rival offers while discontinuing or discouraging any features where they're doing better than the rival is. How does this make sense?

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#559

Post by oblio »

flobosg wrote: post #555
arp242 wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing That's exactly what I'm not looking for; I'm perfectly fine with making my own music choices. I know what I like, have an extensive "library" on Spotify, and play from just that. The biggest thing I'm missing from Spotify (or indeed, most players, except the one I wrote myself years ago) is the ability to say "play random album fro…

> "play random album from my collection" Quod Libet ( https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ ) lets you do exactly that.

Can you use that on Android?

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#560

Post by chewz »

sundvor wrote: post #511
RogerL wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking for myself? Content. Philip Glass has 27 albums on Pandora, 105 on Spotify. Nico Mulhy? 7 vs 14. Maarja Nuut. Only 1 album on Pandora. For her, Pandora makes no recommendations for others to listen to, Spotify lists 20. Pandora has no bio, Spotify does. Third Coast Percussion? 8 vs 10. I'm just randomly clicking in my library and doing a comparison, they aren't artfully chosen examples. I recognize this isn'…

You could check out YouTube Music (edit: changed from "music"), which has a long list of Philip Glass titles that may be up there with Spotify. I gave up on Spotify when they removed the widget functionality on Android. I know they returned it eventually, but not without complete uproar. It burned myself as a decade old (family) premium user though; I used to love them, but that complete disregard completely changed…

While Youtube Music is a bag of some great ideas and implementation that went horribly wrong I have started using it over Spotify recently.

Youtube Music implementation of Chromecast is spotless while Spotify every so often interupts with "Your spotify account is used on another device" (Not true just checking my phone). In general Youtube is also tolerant of using two devices with the same account for a few moments.

And no podcasts in the music app... Hurah...

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