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

neil.computer

161–170 of 504 posts

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

#161
post #43

Spotify 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've never understood the Spotify love. I tried it long ago and didn't like it at all. Ended up on GPM until Google pushed me to YTM. Now on AM, and it works fine with how I listen to music.

I wonder if it's just different ways that people listen to music that lead them to prefer one service over another?

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

#162

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…

Turntables are not cheap because of the vinyl revival, so they are trendy, hence expensive.

Nobody wants CD players :(

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

#164

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…

> "But what have we lost?!"

make a comment or thread about spotify/pandora/tidal and sit back and wait to see how long it takes for some “audiophile” to come along and to admonish you and tell you a story about their setup and music appreciation “workflow” and how it is better and somehow more correct.

we lost nothing. it is all still here. and, apparently, the added bonus of droves of sweaty people telling you you’re doing it wrong. life is grand.

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

#165

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…

I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. In the streaming era, it's easier than ever before to discover new artists and listen to an unprecedented variety of music with minimal investment. If it's slightly cumbersome to listen to albums on Spotify, it's still much less cumbersome that going to a store to buy a CD or purchasing online and waiting for it to arrive + keeping your collection physically organized and in good condition. I don't absolutely love Spotify but I'm not going back to a CD collection.

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

#166
post #117

At the same time I met a five year old who'd show me how they is finding their favorite songs on Spotify, even though they can't read yet. I feel like "I need my plain text interface back, yesterday"-folks maybe don't consider how many different people are actually using these apps.

Spotify has a dedicated kids app for those with a family plan, it's one thing I miss from my subscription. However the interface is basically the same as the full version so maybe the developers think adults use apps in the same way as children...

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

#167
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface In most big web services, actual functionality in the API normally seems to leads to its eventual deprecation. Will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

Didn't they deprecate libspotify the other day?

Not sure if you could call that "the other day", I think it happened back in 2015 or something like that.

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

#168
post #43

Spotify 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 recently switched to Tidal. Same price, better audio quality, better user interface. I try it out for a couple of months to see how it goes.

By the way, I'm always tempted to go back to pirating, and use these services just to discover new music. Given the cost of storage today disks I can easily get 1Tb of FLAC music on my NAS, and discard any streaming service. So I can also get music in a quality that you can't get on a streaming service, all you find is remastered albums that doesn't always sound as good as the original.

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

#169

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…

I've deliberately frozen my Spotify on the April 30th, 2021 version largely for this reason. It's one of the last versions that still supported the "classic" UI, which is much snappier and has a proper, compact songs table and a decent albums view.

Still works great with zero compatibility issues that I've noticed.

http://mckinlay.net.nz/images/Spotify-Screenshot.png

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

#170
post #90

Try cmd+K - it brings up a search modal which shows results in a table.

Also discovered this by accident recently. I have 200+ playlists and this type of search is the most reliable way of finding a saved or self-created playlist by name (looking at you "normal" Spotify search that always shows others' public playlists of the same name first).

Funny enough it's not documented, so let's see how long it will stick around for: https://support.spotify.com/kr-en/article/keyboard-shortcuts...

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