The Spotify rant:
Here's how I listen to music: entire specific albums, in tracklist order, maybe queue up a couple albums. I always know what I want to listen before even thinking of opening a music player. Maybe the odd playlist if it's say, a game soundtrack that doesn't have a single album release.
Here's how Spotify fucks it up:
Home page shows a couple recent albums, which might or not be what I want to listen to. Despite the set of music I listen to being mostly fixed, it is not small, so it doesn't fit in the single row of big album art buttons.
It also shows recommendations, which as I described, have 0 value to me, and in fact, are of negative value when they take space of features that would have positive value.
The side bar has a couple options, but most of the space is dedicated to playlists ("create playlist", the button I never clicked, as well as "liked songs" and a list of arbitrary playlists). As I don't use playlists most of the time, the ones that do show up are a random smattering of previous listens.
I then click the "Your Library" tab. First of all, I was walking through the app while writing this, and a full modal to some random ass merch ad showed up. (related to the silly Wrapped thingy) I am a paying user, why am I seeing ads?
Anyways, the first page in Your Library is always Playlists, which, as previously estabilished, are useless to me. So another click to go to the Albums tab.
The albums tab is pretty alright, maybe not very information dense, and no categorization options, but it works.
Now, let me set up my listening. I go to album A, click play. It starts playing album A, brilliant. Then I go to album B, which I would like to play after album A, so I click "add to queue", which for some reason is hidden behind a "..." menu even though there more than half a screen of empty space in the row of buttons where it lies.
Did you spot what I did wrong? Playing an album plays the first song in the album, and puts the rest in the "up next" part of the queue, but queueing an album queues all its songs in the "queue" part of the queue. "up next" goes after "queue", so this means I will hear song A1, then B1, B2, [...], then A2, A3, [...]
But wait, There's more! Last time I used Spotify, I did not finish listening to the queued songs! Blimey me, there were still some songs from album C in there! So actually, my listening order is A1, C7, C8, B1, B2, [...], A2, A3, [...]. No, bad user, you did the incantation wrong!
So my usual workflow for using this blasted application is:
Open the app.
Click the tiny "queue" icon that has no indication about if there are things there or not.
Click "Clear queue"
Click "Your Library"
Click "Albums"
Select the album I want.
Click the "..."
Click "Add to queue"
Go back to the album list
Click the other album
Click the "..."
Click "Add to queue"
Rinse and repeat.
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I don't even particularly mind having the feature of storing the queue for the future, it has been useful a couple times, but the fact that everything is hidden behind a million pages of useless bullshit is infuriating.
Compare it, for example, to the Elisa player on KDE, which is pretty simplistic, it gets it right! Straight to the music, the playlist ("queue" in Spotify terminology) is visible so I can immediately see and clear it if I want, playing an album doesn't put its song in the limbo queue...
Even the good old Windows Media Player has a fantastic library UI that goes straight to the point!