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

neil.computer

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

#131

Post by rednum »

I used to really like Spotify when I first installed it long time ago, but over the years they worked really hard to make me hate them with passion. It feels like their motto is "Change for change's sake", they seem to remove and add stuff randomly, shuffle UI elements whenever they want to, etc. In the meantime, the basic functionalities regress. I had the app bug out on me countless times in weird ways; offline stuff disappearing, freezes when clicking on an album, that one time when I was listening on headphones and suddenly Spotify changed volume from minimum to max and almost gave me hearing damage, etc.

Some time ago I moved to Tidal. It's not perfect, the search is inferior, the app bugs out sometimes too; but at least they don't seem to change it that much.

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

#132

Post by basisword »

karatinversion wrote: post #115
basisword wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Surprised by this comment - in my experience, Spotify is the only application I’ve used which takes a noticeable time to render its window when I alt-tab to it.

I mean alt-tabbing to it isn’t really ‘using’ it. I was referring to searching, clicking links to albums/playlists etc. with Apple Music these all load like a webpage so you get a white screen while they load.

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

#133

Post by danielovichdk »

pnut wrote: post #108
danielovichdk wrote: post #48

I use Winamp for my MP3 collection that I downloaded of my T1 line at the office. When I turn that mother up on and my CRT monitor starts smoking because of the Winamp addons that spikes all kinds of shit whenever the tune is changing, then I know I have found the right track. Then I get cracking on the floor. Break dancing and caps flying around. The neighbors come jumping in the door and starts clapping and the mus…

Forgive me if I'm wrong but I suspect this comment is GPT3 generated. Regardless, it was hilariously absurd.

No GPT here. Just CRT and MP3.

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

#134

Post by madisp »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #16

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…

Album listener here too. I really liked the "Shuffle albums" feature in iTunes so I built a tiny webapp to give me a random album from my library - https://shuffle.ninja

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

#136

Post by lucsky »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #16

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…

How do you deal with playback? The Spotify web playback SDK requires browsers DRM support, and baseline Electron does not include Chrome's Widevine CDM libraries. I know there are alternative Electron "distribution" which try to workaround the problem but it only makes the whole thing even more complicated :/

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

#138

Post by grishka »

dm270 wrote: post #14

I don't know if others saw the same behavior. I'm on Android. And I feel like I'm in some sort of a big A/B test regarding their app. One day, the interface changes one way, couple days later it changes back. Constantly some menu or behavior changes. It's super frustrating. Lately it seems to have stabilized, but it really made me feel like a guinea pig. And maybe that's my inner old person speaking, but most of the…

Wait till you see how much Instagram A/B tests everything. I found a debug menu in it one day when reverse engineering it to get rid of the ads, and so enabled it as well. Among other things, there is a complete list of all server-side settings (or "quick experiments" as they call them) with the ability to override them. There's at least several hundred of these, possibly a thousand or more. It's insane. The kinds of stuff they're A/B testing, too — wording, button colors, bug fixes, animation durations...

I have no doubt Spotify is doing the same. Every large company does it. This practice of data-driven development is such a disgrace to the IT industry.

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

#139

Post by jarek83 »

raydiatian wrote: post #20

A concise explanation: functionalism is secondary to the attention economy for modern media platforms. Hard to advertise in a functional list grid, but yeah like fuck, I’m right there with you. It’s to the point where I’d rather just steal the album off of YouTube. At least there’s an ad-blocker.

functionalism is secondary to the attention economy for modern media platforms.

Sure, but can't they make the functional layout version optional?

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

#140

Post by Macha »

iamcreasy wrote: post #102
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #16

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 neat. Do they have SDK to build desktop players? (Excluding wrapping the web SDK around Electron)

No, they killed the legacy API which most used recently. Also unless you want to pay for your own widevine license, even Electron is not an option.

Any that still work are using librespot, which uses their undocumented smart device API

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