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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?

#261

Post by hammock »

maxique wrote: post #258
hammock wrote: post #255

There is a great website someone put up called “sort my music” and also “organize your music”. If you google those terms they are the first and second result. It will allow you to sort Spotify playlists by a number of hidden variables like BPM and year of release. You can also export/copy paste the tables that it generates in the process. Not perfect and might not fit your exact use case, but wanted to let HN know.

Those tools and more are on Playlist Machinery ( http://www.playlistmachinery.com/ )

Wow they have added so much

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

#262

Post by lightbendover »

mjlee wrote: post #12
quickthrower2 wrote: post #2

Netflix and Amazon are terrible. Want to continue what you were watching? Gonna have to find where we hid that this time, g’luck!

John Siracusa, a fairly well known Apple pundit, wrote one of his semi-annual blog posts on this - https://hypercritical.co/2022/02/17/streaming-app-sentiments It's a follow up to an earlier article where he lays out the table stakes for streaming apps, both worth reading.

I found it incredibly amusing to sit through spec discussions of {big company's} new shiny long-term A/B success metric a few years ago. Hundreds of inputs, ML-based modeling, etc.. all to decide if change #574843 will eventually make more money or not. CX scoring was hotly debated as a model input and was ultimately voted against. Companies don't care if you enjoy your experience, they only care if you engage and spend money. Streaming, social media, retail, gaming; they're all full of dark patterns that lead to bad experiences so the company makes an extra buck. Honestly, I'm tired of this industry.

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

#264

Post by user3939382 »

I feel like I have such a disconnect from most others with these services.

I tried out Pandora one night when it first came out while I was in college in 2004/2005. Then it was “someone made an algorithm that can pick music for you!” After about 15 minutes I lost interest “Hm that’s neat, I’m good though I know what I like”

Fast forward 17 years and you have these multibillion dollar companies everyone loves and hates, controversies. I never saw the appeal in the first place.

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

#265

Post by ryandrake »

mongol wrote: post #231
frogstomp19 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Many people bring up the "discover new music" argument. It is probably subjective, but for me this has never been an issue. There are so many way to discover new music today, there are tons on youtube and people recommend in the comments, you see a mention of something and head over to Wikipedia, follow some links, and so on. I don't need an algorithm for it, an algorithm that most likely is more optimized for revenu…

Streaming has sacrificed so much at the altar of "discovery". Sometimes you want discovery and sometimes you don't. More and more, I'm finding I don't care about discovery and just want to listen to my music. If it's a choice between my old late-2000s era iPod loaded with my carefully curated list of albums and streaming services which are optimized for "discovery" and "engagement" and require the network to be online, I pick the iPod any day of the week.

Other people like streaming, and want The Algorithm to feed them discovery, and that's fine--it's just not for me.

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

#267

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

What if you make a playlist with the songs of an album, in order?

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

#268

Post by nightowl_games »

Spotify's UI is a case study of the negative impact of assigning single screens to single teams, designers and managers. There is no cohesive vision. The useful functionality is all obscured by esthetics. I am perpetually annoyed at how poor spotify is at it's basic purpose. They have leaned way too far into recommendation systems and over designed layout. 99% of the time, I know what I want to listen to. Spotify's UX is designed for people to 'browse' the app. That doesnt resonate with me, at all. I know what I want.

My biggest gripe with spotify is it's inability to reliably answer the question of "what playlist or source am I currently listening too?". A constant flow that spotify fails to deliver on is this: Search for a song, play the song, then the rest of the album, on repeat, without shuffle. It's annoying to have to load multiple slow UIs to navigate from search to album, visually search the album's track list and play the song your after.

Itunes and Windows Media Player set the standard for how media should be navigated and Spotify should use some of those old standard concepts.

EDIT:

Try browsing Armin Van Buuren's massive discography on Spotify.

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

#269

Post by kayodelycaon »

javajosh wrote: post #214
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turntables are not cheap because of the vinyl revival, so they are trendy, hence expensive. Nobody wants CD players :(

I know! CDs are such a great format, and as long as the ink doesn't corrode the aluminum layer, they can last a very long time. They are more compact than vinyl, they don't suffer from lots of vinyl's error modes but they still have things like liner notes. Plus they represent an album at a theoretical maximum of fidelity and reproducibility. What's not to like?

Physical storage space. ;)

My laptop is smaller than any collection of CDs and can store an entire building of them in the space of 12 jewel cases.

If you include my phone and a cellular connection for streaming, the entire world of music can be accessed in a device smaller than any portable CD player. And the speakers in my iPhone are better than most stereos from the same era.

We truly live in the world where science fiction has become reality. :D

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

#270

Post by solarkraft »

flycaliguy wrote: post #244
lapser wrote: 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.

Spotify was promoting a podcast to me for a while called “c*m town” (add a u). It was so gross, the album cover was written in white liquid. I could not make it go away! One of the worst UI experiences ever, actually made my stomach turn.

Cum Town can be a fun podcast, but it just doesn't belong in between music. "I want to focus on somebody talking about something" is a very different mood than "I want to tune out with some music".

I get the business incentives, but I have to imagine some manager somewhere going "Perfect, it's both audio content!".

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