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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?

#411

Post by neilpanchal »

mattlondon wrote: post #159

To be honest the album art view in media catalogs is actually quite easy to "scan" if you know what you are looking for already. I guess our brains are probably hard wired for this sort of visual quickly-spotting-something-familair/-important/-dangerous-in-a-jumble-of-other-stuff type thing. I would prefer a toggle to flip between a list (ideally with sortable headers etc) and album art cover view though - not exactl…

This is true, visual search has a optima when the contrast of the object in the search field is above certain threshold. Below that magic threshold, it is useless (for e.g searching for a Jigsaw puzzle piece). But, when visual search works, it is probably ridiculously fast for the evolutionary reasons you rightfully mentioned.

There are a couple of things when we search for something in a text box: We're pattern matching what we think their database contains. If the hysteresis between the search and the match is small, Album grid view might work. You have to know the cover art a-priori though. But if you are vaguely looking for something, list is far better.

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

#412

Post by kzrdude »

srrr wrote: post #196
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…

15 years ago when I worked in the music streaming space we also had to push users to playlists instead of albums. The reason, in Germany at least, was that a playlist only payed 1/10 the royalties to the GEMA [1] than an album playthrough. Playlists were classified as ¨radio¨ and thus a performance of the radio station but an album was the performance of the original artist. Our interface was optimized for low royalt…

On Spotify the reason is similar but structurally different. With algorithmic playlists they can tinker with the mix of songs - they can choose what the average royalty payout should be as a target variable for the song mix, so that both more expensive and cheaper songs are used.

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

#413

Post by kzrdude »

dendriti wrote: post #279
mahogany wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Youtube does for the rest of us

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

#414

Post by imbnwa »

sprremix wrote: post #369

There are some alternative frontends for Spotify available. None of the ones I found works on M1 mac, but Windows and Linux users have some options available. https://github.com/jpochyla/psst https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue https://github.com/xou816/spot

Psst runs on Rosetta just fine on my M1 Mini. Only issue they're using drawing the window themselves and it has issues re-drawing itself after wake

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

#415

Post by basisword »

0x00000000 wrote: post #342
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.

My biggest issue with it is that every time my phone connects to bluetooth Apple Music starts playing my entire library on shuffle wasting all of my data and battery and there is no way to turn off this feature. It seriously has me contemplating switching but the alternatives are not appealing.

Definitely a bug and not a feature. I’ve never had this happen, ever.

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

#417

Post by cortesoft »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #200
daveoc64 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why should the medium not matter? I actually feel that's the shallow take Quite often, historically, music comes as part of a complete experiential package. Gatherings around fire, singing and dancing in groups, celebrating life's milestones, getting dressed up for concerts, excitement at buying tickets, journeying in and out of the city to pick up new recordings. All of those things are valid aspects of musical cult…

Weren’t those things stripped from music when we invented recording?

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

#418

Post by cortesoft »

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…

You can still buy music in physical form, so nothing has been lost. If you like that method, you can still do it.

Most people don’t, however, because it is much cheaper and easier to stream. Clearly what we have lost is not worth the price to maintain what we had, or people would still be buying music instead of streaming.

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

#420

Post by myself248 »

the_only_law wrote: post #340
anticristi wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for highlighting this! I was getting the feeling that search has become increasingly crappier. Not just Spotify, but also in other places like Google, Facebook and DuckDuckGo. Search for anything and you'll get something "pausibly deniability" close to what you typed, but optimized for metrics that are way beyond the user's comprehension. I feel like singling out Facebook, the worst offender: Their search is o…

Hah, I searched “cam” in the windows search bar the other day looking to open the camera app, but windows decided I was actually looking for “Calculator” or a handful of other things that didn’t have a single “M” in it listed ahead of the actual camera app.

Getting a bit off-topic here but YES, this drives me bonkers.

Worse yet is that if I pause there for a moment, the search results continue to reorganize themselves, so that by the time I'm ready with a screenshot, the wrong answer has vanished. I can only catch it on video.

How did search turn so terrible?

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