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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?

#281

Post by Gigachad »

hyperbovine wrote: post #202
javajosh wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly on an ultrapowerful mobile computing device that fits comfortably in my pocket. Place yourself in about 1997 and savor that statement for a moment. But what have we gained?

Dystopia is when I have to use electron and a slightly inconvenient UI. HN users must have pretty comfy lives.

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

#282

Post by dendriti »

javajosh wrote: post #203
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…

>I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. We've lost: cover art, liner notes, the ability to share or sell your music without 3rd party permission, music stores, and in many cases local music scenes that formed around music stores. Bret Victor has been harping on this for years, but we've also lost a great deal of tactility - putting a CD in a player and pressing buttons to play it uses your hands in pleasant ways…

As someone with mobility impairment, putting a CD in a player and pressing buttons to play was never pleasant. In fact I was often stuck with whatever five CDs were left in the player. CDs actually haven't gone away, and you can still use them today. I am glad the world has moved on though.

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

#283

Post by darkwater »

jstummbillig wrote: post #212
caymanjim wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what do people do with this power? Listen on shitty tinny phone speakers or comically bad earbuds. Give me back my glorious 80s stereo.

You'll be hard pressed to buy comically bad earbud nowadays. In terms of fidelity and price, average earbuds beat an average 80s stereo so hard, it's not even funny.

Err, no? I have a pair of cheap airpod imitation, best selling on Amazon with 4 stars (and reviews looked REAL), and they suck so hard that I had better quality with my walkman copy with its earbuds in 1988.

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

#285

Post by solarkraft »

intothemild wrote: post #23
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!

It's why I'm being driven back to piracy, because the UI/UX is do horrible on these platforms, that and believe it or not because Content discovery is easier a couple of the piracy apps look at what I have in my collection, and do recommendations off that... And guess what.. it's really good. So a bunch of people in their spare time seem to be doing a better job than Netflix, why is that? Because I don't think Netfli…

The beauty of piracy is that people go through an effort to share what they like, not what some company wants to push on you, which rewards high quality.

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

#286

Post by jiggyjace »

psyc wrote: post #260
WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey something about this comment just seemed a bit over the top negative/angry and didn’t sit right with me. Hope you remember not to take all these small frustrations too seriously in life. Wishing you well and sending positive vibes. (and I switched to Apple too)

Here's mine. Fuck Spotify. Any user problem gets referred to the suggestion box where you'll always be told to go fuck yourself. That's the only attitude they know: fuck you with a generic smile. There's this feature that they think is neat, and nobody wants, where they'll switch to whatever device you pick up and pick up where you left off. The problem is that for many users, the only thing it does is persistently s…

Jeez all of my friends and family and I use Spotify and not once have we had issues like this. Luckily there are plenty of other streaming services to use mate

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

#288

Post by behnamoh »

Gigachad wrote: post #281
hyperbovine wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly on an ultrapowerful mobile computing device that fits comfortably in my pocket. Place yourself in about 1997 and savor that statement for a moment. But what have we gained?

Dystopia is when I have to use electron and a slightly inconvenient UI. HN users must have pretty comfy lives.

well, most are earning hundreds of $1000 a year, so their expectations and concerns must be different

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

#289

Post by reaperducer »

criley2 wrote: post #234
caymanjim wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what do people do with this power? Listen on shitty tinny phone speakers or comically bad earbuds. Give me back my glorious 80s stereo.

Audio quality was garbage then too. We have rose-tinted memories of people with hundreds-then thousands-now worth of audio equipment. The average tin can radio in a car or in your house in the 80s was so comically bad compared to now that you'd think it was anachronistically bad. Frankly phones sound better than those cars LOL For the same money as your glorious 80s stereo, adjusted up, you can still get glorious aud…

Audio quality was garbage then too.

Not as bad as you might suppose.

My wife has a 1983 Panasonic turntable/radio/cassette player that she uses sometimes. We're talking about low build quality, hot pink, designed for the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl who will listen while simultaneously squeeing on a three-way call on a Garfield phone. It's not bad. Neither of us have perfect hearing, and are far from audiophiles.

The key is the right media for the right device.

When she's playing brand new, 180-gram, super-hipster vinyl, her expensive modern gear in the living room is where it sounds best.

But when she's playing a 1983 copy of Girls Just Want To Have Fun, it sounds best on the pink Panasonic. Pretty much any record made before 2000 sounds better on the period-correct turntable, compared with the high-end player, and vice-versa.

She will only listen to cassettes — new or old — on the 1983 machine, even though she has a Panasonic cassette boom box that she bought in Japan in 2019. The old gear just sounds better.

More and more she's been finding music on Apple Music during her lunch hour, then buying the vinyl or cassette to listen to the music at home. Again, she's not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but she finds the sound of analog much more pleasant. To me, it's pretty close, but less "sterile," for lack of a better word.

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

#290

Post by behnamoh »

solarkraft wrote: post #280
grishka wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till you see how much Instagram A/B tests everything. I found a debug menu in it one day when reverse engineering it to get rid of the ads, and so enabled it as well. Among other things, there is a complete list of all server-side settings (or "quick experiments" as they call them) with the ability to override them. There's at least several hundred of these, possibly a thousand or more. It's insane. The kinds of…

It's amazing how much thought and effort seems to go into Instagram's UI while it looks completely unplanned and is, for me, pretty unusable. Nothing makes sense. The UI is similarly weirdly designed to Snapchat and Discord, so maybe it has something to do with targeting "the kids". I don't get how people can be comfortable using that stuff at all.

Ig is the perfect example of an app that optimizes for engagement while providing a really buggy and low-quality experience
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