The design trend of replacing dense tables with white space heavy lists just grinds my gears. It’s in everything these days.
Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
321–330 of 504 posts
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#322Spotify is full of those UI frustrations. There have been many times where I've thought "Just give me 'select * from songs where artist = % order by listen_count'".
I started slowly moving myself away from online streaming services for my daily listening. I ripped all my CDs (to FLAC so I can re-encode to whatever I want in the future) and started buying albums from new artists off of Bandcamp, 7digital and HDTracks. I've even bought a few new CDs from local record stores and ripped them. I still use streaming services for discovery but I'm moving back to blogs (Pitchfork, Stereogum, etc), aggregators (Anydecentmusic) and forums for more of that discovery.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#323Spotify 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.
Yes, and isn't generating a random order, then playing the songs in the album/playlist in that generated order the best way to do that? Ie, no repeats until every song has been played. That's how the MIX button on my car CD player works, that's how my MP3 player works, and that's how the Phonograph music player on my phone works. Why should Spotify be any different?
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
> I didn't discover a single new artist through it. That's surprising. I've never used Spotify for this, but 10+ years ago used Pandora for that purpose. I was overjoyed with the new artists I learned about.
It’s not surprising to me that someone who very clearly hates Spotify for ideological reasons doesn’t have a good experience when using it.
Spotify is amazing for discovery, they’re holding it wrong.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#325I 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…
AB is the worst. I don't know how long it's been going on, but on YouTube’s homepage it keeps alternating between "Hover to expand video and see Watch Later button" and the regular always-visible Watch Later button. https://imgur.com/a/70p07Ku Pick one already.
I think you can turn off that expand-on-hover popup in the YouTube settings. I found it super annoying and I was surprised it was even an option.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#326Earlier 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,…
I’ve found the combination of Apple Music and a nice script to quickly import stuff from bandcamp to navidrome has all my needs met. Music discovery? Talking to people and going to gigs has me covered.
Anything I like I can easily access in ALAC on any device from anywhere in the world.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#327Earlier 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…
Enjoyment of music linked to a specific physical item seems incredibly shallow to me. If the music is worth listening to, the medium shouldn't matter at all.
I suppose then you're a proponent of photographing all famous works of art and displaying them on a webpage somewhere, because if the painting is worth looking at, the medium shouldn't matter at all, right?
I guess going to a museum to view artwork is an incredibly shallow experience for you?
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turntables are not cheap because of the vinyl revival, so they are trendy, hence expensive. Nobody wants CD players :(
I like CDs. I just don't listen to music on physical media enough to really justify having a dedicated setup anymore. My boss, on the other hand, collects the damn things. He's got an entire large bookshelf filled with vintage CD players... To me, vinyl is a collectible, or at least, a way to show "yes I appreciate this music and want to show off that I enjoy it". If I like an artist/album enough, I'll buy the vinyl…
> vintage CD players
Now I feel old. I remember the first time I saw and heard a Compact Disc. It was a rainbow colored object straight from the future. It was magical, the whole family gathered around the little boom box like thing playing some classical music CD.
Also, I hope your boss doesn't actually listen to any CD player built before about the mid 00's or so. Maybe mid-90s if you're talking mega-bucks (at the time) like a Mark Levinson or Theta Digital. But advances in DACs in the last ~20 years made everything prior very obsolete. Nowadays you can get commodity chips in the single digit dollar range that are for all intents and purposes faultless.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#329Spotify is full of those UI frustrations. There have been many times where I've thought "Just give me 'select * from songs where artist = % order by listen_count'". I started slowly moving myself away from online streaming services for my daily listening. I ripped all my CDs (to FLAC so I can re-encode to whatever I want in the future) and started buying albums from new artists off of Bandcamp, 7digital and HDTracks.…
I really don't enjoy that they've started hiding the listen count now so you can no longer tell which songs are the most popular if you're checking out an album.
Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
#330I think one reason companies have been doing this lately is because a surprisingly large population of computer users are only semi-literate (low education or just children). So if you’re doing UX Research you’ll actually notice this more visual, non-textual UI does “better” in a lot of metrics