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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?

#201

Post by mhh__ »

lapser wrote: post #43

Spotify is horrendous. Their UI is subpar. Their mix of podcasts with songs is odd at best (seriously, I never listen to podcasts, why can't I switch it off completely?). Their shuffle is just not. Imagine listening to the same 20ish songs from a playlist of nearly 2k songs. How can you mess up shuffle that bad? It's also not easy to move away from it. It requires time and effort. Time that many don't have.

I honestly don't care about the UI design at all as much as it be absolutely infuriating because it's extremely slow on my still fairly new android phone.

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

#202

Post by hyperbovine »

javajosh wrote: post #154
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…

>Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. Does anyone else get a dystopian vibe from this statement? I feel like the old guy in the SF movie pulling his hair and exclaiming, "But what have we lost?!" We used to have vinyl, tapes, finally CDs, and even the ability to rip our library to a computer, which we could carry with us. It was…

Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly on an ultrapowerful mobile computing device that fits comfortably in my pocket. Place yourself in about 1997 and savor that statement for a moment. But what have we gained?

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

#203

Post by javajosh »

frogstomp19 wrote: post #165
javajosh wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. Does anyone else get a dystopian vibe from this statement? I feel like the old guy in the SF movie pulling his hair and exclaiming, "But what have we lost?!" We used to have vinyl, tapes, finally CDs, and even the ability to rip our library to a computer, which we could carry with us. It was…

I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. In the streaming era, it's easier than ever before to discover new artists and listen to an unprecedented variety of music with minimal investment. If it's slightly cumbersome to listen to albums on Spotify, it's still much less cumbersome that going to a store to buy a CD or purchasing online and waiting for it to arrive + keeping your collection physically organized and i…

>I feel like we've lost essentially nothing.

We've lost: cover art, liner notes, the ability to share or sell your music without 3rd party permission, music stores, and in many cases local music scenes that formed around music stores. Bret Victor has been harping on this for years, but we've also lost a great deal of tactility - putting a CD in a player and pressing buttons to play it uses your hands in pleasant ways that screens just aren't.

As for discovery, the promise is greater than reality. I used Spotify for a while specifically for this purpose, but I didn't discover a single new artist through it. YouTube, by contrast, has introduced me to new artists, as have a few radio stations like KCRW and KQED (who both have excellent YT channels too). And you know what? Music discovery is a different mode of listening than enjoying my library and ne'er the twain shall meet, IMHO.

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

#204

Post by Nullabillity »

capableweb wrote: post #194
stavros wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31420722 Oh, apparently they're completely blocking access now, yay.

In favor of the alternative SDK, whose native SDK seems to be just around the corner. Otherwise there is always librespot ( https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot ). 7 years to go from announcing the deprecation to actually removing it seems fair to me. Miles difference from what I'd expect any other company to do (looking at you Google, who seem to announce a deprecation and go through with it in the very same m…

The alternative SDK has been "just around the corner" ever since the original deprecation.

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

#206

Post by moosimoose »

asdojasdosadsa wrote: post #174

Only reason I use Spotify (Premium = no ads) is that I don't have to manage my music anymore and I can find all the music I need / want. But holy moly it is going towards a bad direction, in fact so bad that I am considering moving to Apple Music... Their desktop app used to have a "search bar" in their Home -view which is now moved to a separate "Search" -view, which is.. one of the most annoying things ever. I used…

In the desktop app, press '?' to get a list of shortcuts. Ctrl-l opens search and focuses the input field, from any page. Ctrl-f searches in the current playlist or page.

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

#207

Post by javajosh »

hyperbovine wrote: post #202
javajosh wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. Does anyone else get a dystopian vibe from this statement? I feel like the old guy in the SF movie pulling his hair and exclaiming, "But what have we lost?!" We used to have vinyl, tapes, finally CDs, and even the ability to rip our library to a computer, which we could carry with us. It was…

Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly on an ultrapowerful mobile computing device that fits comfortably in my pocket. Place yourself in about 1997 and savor that statement for a moment. But what have we gained?

You're right, baby scifi Josh wanted this, got it, and somehow, violating all expectations, it sucked. It happens.

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

#208

Post by sosull »

pessimizer wrote: post #191
m1gu3l wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "But what have we lost?!" make a comment or thread about spotify/pandora/tidal and sit back and wait to see how long it takes for some “audiophile” to come along and to admonish you and tell you a story about their setup and music appreciation “workflow” and how it is better and somehow more correct. we lost nothing. it is all still here. and, apparently, the added bonus of droves of sweaty people telling you you’r…

Looks like we lost the ability to go through a list of songs from an album, episodes from a podcast, or podcasts from a collection, which is the subject of TFA.

Slightly beside the point, but it is a problem that just doesn’t afflict Apple Music: those folks seem totally happy to make the kind of software that plays albums in sequence. The true surprise is that a century-old function has become a differentiating feature.

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

#209

Post by caymanjim »

hyperbovine wrote: post #202
javajosh wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. Does anyone else get a dystopian vibe from this statement? I feel like the old guy in the SF movie pulling his hair and exclaiming, "But what have we lost?!" We used to have vinyl, tapes, finally CDs, and even the ability to rip our library to a computer, which we could carry with us. It was…

Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly on an ultrapowerful mobile computing device that fits comfortably in my pocket. Place yourself in about 1997 and savor that statement for a moment. But what have we gained?

And what do people do with this power? Listen on shitty tinny phone speakers or comically bad earbuds. Give me back my glorious 80s stereo.
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