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

neil.computer

351–360 of 504 posts

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

#352

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…

Woah! Is it similar to Reddit's API with no limit whatsoever and do whatever you want with it?

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

#353
Just want to give a shoutout to Amazon Music, who (in a good way?) don't care much about the customer or a great experience, or even about being seen as a company who cares a lot about music or the artists.

They just shove a bunch of music into a giant search engine and do some easily ignorable curation.

But their search works great, easy to play an album, good back catalog on Unlimited (I've been doing a lot of crate digging into the early 2000s using Wikipedia's album catgeory listings and my hit rate between the list and it being in Amazon is about 85%)

The API sucks, playlists have weird limits, their UI is atrocious ... but you can hear what you like, when you like, so I'm happy.

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>We've lost: cover art Spotify does have cover art for albums, at least for me it does. > Music discovery is a different mode of listening For me it really is the same mode. I regularly discover new artists when my handcrafted playlists finish playing and it starts to play music based on the playlist I just listened to

> Spotify does have cover art for albums, at least for me it does.

I think parent means something like this: https://www.encartespop.com.br/2012/09/encarte-pink-floyd-da...

The vinyl and especially CD covers were sometimes a little more than just barren images.

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

#356
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.

What really floors me is their lyric integration.

Initially I though “oh cool neat”, and although I never noticed inaccuracies, I was willing to let it to, lyric listings aren’t always 100% accurate anyway, especially for older underground stuff of people who have indecipherable vocals at times (Mike IX Williams for example)

However as time passed I noticed in a ton of the songs I was listening to, the lyrics would be missing entire verses, hooks, choruses or in occasion show the lyrics to a 100% unrelated song. There were also blatant typos, that looked like someone was quickly typing the lyrics on their phone and didn’t check to read and bad autocorrects or anything.

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

#357

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?

The dystopian part is that all of the modern centralized services tend to evolve in spying and manipulating wannabe monopolists.

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

#358

I use Winamp for my MP3 collection that I downloaded of my T1 line at the office. When I turn that mother up on and my CRT monitor starts smoking because of the Winamp addons that spikes all kinds of shit whenever the tune is changing, then I know I have found the right track. Then I get cracking on the floor. Break dancing and caps flying around. The neighbors come jumping in the door and starts clapping and the mus…

What skin and visualizer are you using?

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

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoyment of music linked to a specific physical item seems incredibly shallow to me. If the music is worth listening to, the medium shouldn't matter at all.

I suppose then you're a proponent of photographing all famous works of art and displaying them on a webpage somewhere, because if the painting is worth looking at, the medium shouldn't matter at all, right? I guess going to a museum to view artwork is an incredibly shallow experience for you?

Album art etc. is supplementary to the music - I don't need to see it on a square piece of cardboard to "appreciate" it.

An original artwork is just that - best when the original is viewed. A CD, Tape, or Vinyl is in no way "the original".

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

#360

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 U…

I do not work for Spotify. The following are a bunch of educated guesses based on how 'old standard concepts' drift towards 'new concepts'.

1. They test their UI with their target users (assumes they have a handle on who pays $$$ for the service besides ad revenue)

2. People who just want functionality are not a high percentage of users or use cases

3. A good number of users/use cases value visual feedback via simple, larger imagery over condensed information displays (condensed displays are also harder to design well)

4. There are halo and competitive effects, and all apps of a certain class end up looking alike and imitating each other's visual languages and decisions, with design gradually drifting towards a new set of rules that become 'standard'.

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