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Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

neil.computer

71–80 of 504 posts

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#71
post #57

This is a big frustration of mine, too. The other is that Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface, which is actually what I recently started doing: https://i.imgur.com/ar7VrYy.png . It's still work in progr…

Looks pretty nice. Is it in a browser wrapper or just on web/built using something else?

It's just a website as it depends on the web playback sdk. It could be wrapped into a desktop app with something like tauri easily enough, which is something I'm considering. Would always be available as a web app, though.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#73

I f'ing hate spotify with a passion. The shit UX and them pushing JRE and other bullshit podcasts I dont want or need in my life was bad, but for me the final straw was that they decided to show me popups for their shit playlists when I was trying to put on one some music. Found out they have been doing it for years to people, and if you complain they basically refer you to the suggestion box and to go f yourself. I…

>> So I switched back to Apple music. It's pretty shit, but at least I get to decide what I want to listen too.

I love and hate Apple Music. The library style interface is great. But for a company that hangs on about the virtue of native apps the Music app is complete dogshit. Even with the recent slightly more native “rewrite” I still spend ages waiting for screens to load. Spotify is so much snappier.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#74
I remember posting this to hn some time ago and it was well enough received that I'll mention it here, a self-hosted streaming solutions with absolutely no bells or whistles. Just a table of music, though, the table is generated by a search query, fast.

https://github.com/DusteDdk/dstream

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#75
I second this.

Also this UI / UX issue isn't just a problem with Spotify but iTunes (Apple Music) to! So I guess it's just a general trend that started for no good reason.

In iTunes, the table view is now only for the main page, and has been gone from the search and the playlist pages. It's so inconsistent. You get the nice old-school table view when you're on default but then when on the search page they display it on grid view. On the playlist page, you're like on this weird half-table half-grid view.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#77

Dear Spotify, please do not go back to 2001. Thanks. On a serious note. If all you do is high intent searches (I know exactly the one song/podcast I want), Spotify is not for you. Spotify is about discovery. Stick to iTunes or Winamp or Kazaa or Youtube or anything else that just gives you a list of things. Don't make the product worse because you're using it for something it's not designed around.

Why not both?

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#78

Netflix and Amazon are terrible. Want to continue what you were watching? Gonna have to find where we hid that this time, g’luck!

It's why I'm being driven back to piracy, because the UI/UX is do horrible on these platforms, that and believe it or not because Content discovery is easier a couple of the piracy apps look at what I have in my collection, and do recommendations off that... And guess what.. it's really good. So a bunch of people in their spare time seem to be doing a better job than Netflix, why is that? Because I don't think Netfli…

I have the same issues with all of these services. But I'm wondering if it's some kind "expert mode" issue which is only a problem for a small advanced-user minority - many of whom will be reading HN.

Do most users want to be told what to consume?

Circumstantially I'd guess so, because otherwise it's a lot of effort to add friction for no reason.

But I don't know.

Possibly Spotify and Netflix do. Or possibly not. Perhaps they're just dysfunctional?

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#79
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface In most big web services, actual functionality in the API normally seems to leads to its eventual deprecation. Will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

IIRC, the API is for paying users only.

Some parts of it are free, getting general data and statistics for example. But if you want to use a third party front-end, you'll need premium
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