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Audiobooks on Spotify

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Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#261

Post by stavros »

eduction wrote: post #260
stavros wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the GP. Yes, the infrastructure is great, but the client itself is trash. Winamp consumed 1% of my CPU twenty years ago, Spotify consumes 10% now . Not only do they mostly do the same thing, but Winamp did much more. This is a major, major regression, that we have machines thousands of times faster but the software is an order of magnitude slower and more resource-hungry than back then on the much faster…

You agree that Winamp has 10x the functionality of Spotify?

Yes, easily. Just the plugins alone are easily 10x the functionality.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#262

Post by rumori »

It’s worth noting Spotify handles it’s developer community just as bad. They took away the old SDK where you could play songs from Spotify without bouncing off to the Spotify app and replaced it a way worse user experience. Any question related to this change goes unanswered. Same with rate limit extension requests for apps.

It’s really hard to feel sorry for them getting treated bad by Apple while they do the exact same thing to their community.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#263

Post by LtWorf »

tpxl wrote: post #63
ihuman wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on the service or app. Some accept both, and some only take RSS. Apple Podcasts used to accept Atom feeds, but they don't anymore for new podcasts. All the feeds Edit: do you know any podcasts that use an atom feed? None of the 80 feeds in my podcast app are atom feeds.

The underlying protocol is an implementation detail. I don't know any atom feed podcasts (and can't find any), but I can find references to people using (or trying to use) atom for podcasts.

> The underlying protocol is an implementation detail.

So you are saying you could do HTML without TCP/IP? Would that work you think?

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#264

Post by ioseph »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #111
fleddr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is that they have many teams each doing a tiny part of the app's UI, and proudly advertise this model as a best practice: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal... Baffling how you can have so many engineers working on a music player, and it ends up worse than Winamp or Mediaplayer from 25 years ago.

Software interfaces in general have regressed severely since the mid-2000s. Media players are a perfect example. There was 10x more functionality in Winamp or Windows Media Player than we get in Spotify or Apple Music today. What is going on? Why are things getting dumber? Are we just optimizing too hard for the lowest common denominator and the average user wants things to be dead simple? I don't want to believe sof…

As a frontend dev I blame it entirely on the "co-design" fad and the rise of A/B testing. When I started 10 years ago the idea was that a designer can objectively produce a good UX using their skills (of course validating it with real users).

These days it seems to be treated more like social science with never ending broad discovery work to answer questions like "How do our users feel"? This stuff is important but I feel is often used to justify decisions poorly compared to a more quantitate approach.

But largely I think A/B testing is to blame, we get more conversions this way (or maybe with spotify user's listen to more tracks / have longer sessions with this particular interface). Often the metric measured is profit driven rather than user enjoyment as well.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#265

Post by ioseph »

eduction wrote: post #150
mostlysimilar wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software interfaces in general have regressed severely since the mid-2000s. Media players are a perfect example. There was 10x more functionality in Winamp or Windows Media Player than we get in Spotify or Apple Music today. What is going on? Why are things getting dumber? Are we just optimizing too hard for the lowest common denominator and the average user wants things to be dead simple? I don't want to believe sof…

>There was 10x more functionality in Winamp or Windows Media Player than we get in Spotify or Apple Music today. Except for the extremely useful functionality of putting a large percentage of the world's music at your fingertips ready for instant listening. Spotify also makes curated playlists ("This Is _[Artist Name]__" playlists), artist pages that show their most popular tracks and discographies, offers profession…

Offline songs is my biggest gripe, they are impossible to find / filter for. To find them (i.e. on a flight) I pretty much have to go into my settings and switch to offline mode.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#266

Post by jterrys »

ROTMetro wrote: post #170
Jorchime wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to love the Discovery Weekly list as well. But since a couple of years, my account recommendations went into some strange niche solution and they recommend the same rubbish over and over again. I even get annoyed at certain genres that I used to mildly enjoy before. If you try to look for a solution, apparently the only way is to cancel the subscription, delete the account, resubscribe and start over ... I wis…

I've heard that their algorithm now prioritizes lower licensing cost songs even if their algos rank them as a lower possible match for you. It also seems like their curated playlists prioritize lower quality songs now too, so I try to find better user generated ones. Why does everything go from good to the lowest mediocrity companies can get away with?

This has always been the problem with Spotify for years but I guess it got worse and more blatant now. There has never been any incentive for the platform to be recommendations neutral and nowhere did they specify how they treat songs and labels from different artists.

Whats particularly egregious with Spotify is that their recommended method of improving your recommendations is to just "listen more to things you like". It's so disingenuous.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#267

Post by AlwaysRock »

Liquid_Fire wrote: post #243
AlwaysRock wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital Audiobooks are becoming more and more of a racket. Amazon recently removed the ability to buy an audio book for a $ amount. You can only buy a credit and exchange that for a book. This means that you might be buying a new $30 book for 1 credit or a $3.25 book for 1 credit. It's incredibly frustrating and only exists to trick readers into overspending on books.

This is only the case on the mobile apps, to avoid paying fees to Google/Apple. If you go to the website, you can still buy the books for regular money in addition to credits. (In addition, the majority of books cost more than 1 credit anyway, so in most cases you are much better off buying via a credit)

I dont actually think you are better off buying a credit in most cases. In many cases, yes. In many cases, no. If you buy older books its very often cheaper to buy the book directly.

It does look like you can buy books on audible.com still. They removed the ability from the mobile app and amazon.com. I wont be surprised if they remove it from audible.com as well.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#268

Post by jasonlotito »

firloop wrote: post #8

As a consumer, I’ve actually come to prefer in app purchases. I love when a subscription is available on IAP because for something like a newspaper, I know that I can cancel it with a couple of taps instead of having to fill out some long retention form or call someone.

So, none of that has anything to do with IAP.

It simply requires that the person be able to cancel easily and in a standardized way. And Apple could enforce that. That's the whole point of having a review process, an app review, all that.

Apple could enforce that, but they choose not to.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#269

Post by jasonlotito »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #65
wobbly_bush wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you also willing to pay the extra Apple tax for this convenience instead of expecting the subscription provider to eat those costs?

Depends on the product and the tax. Looks like I'm paying more via IAP for Youtube ($16 vs $12/mo) and Audible ($16 vs $8/mo ???) according to the prices listed on their website. Half of the services out there probably charge you extra just because you don't have to go through their scummy "cancel subscription" website pipeline. They probably lose millions on that along with the fact that I get an iOS notification wh…

Apple could enforce a clean cancel sub process. They do not. So, instead of making things better for you, the user, you just pay more for them to do nothing.
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