It's funny that Spotify is regarded as a talented dev shop, but they don't know how to seed their random number generator.
Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
271–280 of 504 posts
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#272Spotify 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 read a blog post about this at some point. When people say shuffle, they don't actually mean random. They mean, songs I haven't heard in a while.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#273This 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…
The physicality of cassettes/records/CDs/mini-disks was fun, and listening to an entire album sometimes was really cool - but almost entirely not. Most albums were padded with crap to fill it up so people didn't feel ripped off. Remember, an album in 1985 cost $40 in 2022 dollars. Sure, there were occasional albums that the artist really thought about, including the slipcase, and the physicality of that I miss. But you can still great albums and listen to them in their entirety. Revisiting that nostalgia in 2022 recently, and I've found the joy from an album isn't really what it used to be - mostly because we aren't trapped anymore.
Want to listen to albums? Stop using Spotify. I honestly don't get why people choose that one. Youtube music blows it out of the water, and you can get ad-free youtube with it as well, and share all of it with your "family". Plus it has whole albums as one of the options when you search for artist/song.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#274Spotify 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.
My guess is they pay per play. So to minimize plays, they try to play songs you won't skip, which, naturally are songs you didn't skip the last time they popped up on shuffle.
I'm sure their stats tell them that this gets people to skip less, but it's infuriating when you actually want to shuffle a big list.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spotify was promoting a podcast to me for a while called “c*m town” (add a u). It was so gross, the album cover was written in white liquid. I could not make it go away! One of the worst UI experiences ever, actually made my stomach turn.
It’s worth noting that said podcast is (or was, at least) #1 on Patreon in terms of number of people paying money to the creator(s). I bet that makes it really popular on Spotify, and if you have explicit content turned on, that’s probably why it was recommended. There should still be a master “turn off podcasts” button, although since it’s the only way Premium subscribers are still exposed to ads, fat chance of that…
Not the only way. There are also promotional pop-ups every now and then and I've heard of them introducing an option for artists to pay for better rankings.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#276Spotify 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.
If you're ok with using google's product... I've switched to Youtube music and never looked back, better (simpler ui), live music, (no ads in Youtube since I have to pay anyway cause otherwise it becomes unusable). For some people Spotify is the next best thing since sliced bread, but I think I'm onto the pattern, Spotify is great if you like to vibe with what other people are listening to, all the suggestions seem t…
YouTube music’s integration with YouTube is too weird for me. I used a service to try to import my Spotify into YouTube music, and it did two things that I can’t stand:
1. Subscribed me to every single artist in my artist library on YouTube. It took a long time to clean up my YouTube subscriptions.
2. All my playlists are also YouTube playlists, which isn’t what I want.
3. The tool was fully incapable of transferring my library over, because YouTube music’s API is limited. So no albums or artists can transfer to the library section.
If I can’t transfer my library over, keeping a semblance of organization (such as maintaining a chronological list of “date added” for my songs), I’m gonna struggle to use any alternatives when Spotify does good enough.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#277I 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…
> Why would you want to torment paying customers like that? That's the problem with today's tech industry. The objective is not money, it's "growth and engagement".
Well, the objective is still money, just coming from another source (ads or investors who want to see engagement)
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#278It's funny that Spotify is regarded as a talented dev shop, but they don't know how to seed their random number generator.
Yeah this infuriates me. I have a very large playlist and it will definitely keep playing the same stuff each time I shuffle it. It’s not like is even hard to set a pseudo random seed.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> I can access basically every song ever recorded Not really, there is a lot missing from Spotify, and not just obscure music. And you have to accept the fact that music may (and does) go missing at any time. Plus, even for songs that are on the platform, you are forced to listen to what version they have, which is almost always a "remastered" version. Example: early Beatles songs have vocals hard-panned to one side,…
How does this work for you then:
Spotify allows the vast majority of music listeners far more access to far more music than ever in history.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#280I 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…
It's amazing how much thought and effort seems to go into Instagram's UI while it looks completely unplanned and is, for me, pretty unusable. Nothing makes sense. The UI is similarly weirdly designed to Snapchat and Discord, so maybe it has something to do with targeting "the kids".
I don't get how people can be comfortable using that stuff at all.