Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs? • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by somebehemoth » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

kayodelycaon wrote: post #269

javajosh wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scien…

> And the speakers in my iPhone are better than most stereos from the same era.

Did you live in this era? I don’t think you know what you are talking about.

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

#382

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

AlecSchueler wrote: post #200

daveoc64 wrote: post #189

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.

Why should the medium not matter? I actually feel that's the shallow take Quite often, historically, music comes as part of a complete experiential package. Gatherings around fire, singing and dancing in groups, celebrating life's milestones, getting dressed up for concerts, excitement at buying tickets, journeying in and out of the city to pick up new recordings. All of those things are valid aspects of musical cult…

[deleted]

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

#383

Post by j0112358 » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

I wish so many "modern" things just had "spreadsheet view" and "spreadsheet edit" mode.

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

#384

Post by lemursage » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

solarkraft wrote: post #295

pigeonhole123 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like these design choices are there to hide the fact that their catalog is tiny (maybe especially in Europe). The majority of what I search for just displays things that are similar to what I actually wanted to watch. For example if I search for Family Guy I get some off-brand Netflix cartoon in the "irreverent" category.

Yeah, they can't even tell you they don't have it. I wanted to watch лучше чем люди (Better Than Us), which was recommended to me by a co-worker as available on Netflix. It looks like I was too late and it had left their catalogue again, but anything I found on the internet was either "look at this nice show available on Netflix" (posted 2 years ago) or, very very rarely, a Netflix page with a grayed out play button.…

One more thing I've also noticed. I wanted to exchange movies with a Turkish friend. We both realised that the best movies/series from our regional Netflix offerings are not available in other's Netflix feed. The only available movies were either regional Netflix productions (of contestable quality) or absolutely low-quality non-Netflix productions. Bad search does not help in conscious discovery either. I cannot understand why the best regional movies/series/classics are not shared between regions (excluding UK and US maybe). Those that happen to be available had a very lackluster translation. I doubt this is exclusively licensing issue, but I may be wrong.

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

#385

Post by wutbrodo » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 4:52 PM UTC

I tried switching from YouTube music to spotify recently and was shocked that they don't have a _music library_ feature: a table of songs that you can slice by artist, album, etc, in the manner of every music player since the dawn of time.

How does anyone serious about music use it? Did I somehow miss that spotify is only intended for casual, "I'll listen to whatever"-type users?

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

#386

Post by tomc1985 » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 4:56 PM UTC

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?

Yeah but I don't care about 99.9% of that, and a lot of that other 0.1% isn't even on Spotify.

You could say the same thing about an all-you-can-eat buffet. You won't end up eating the whole restaurant, and if you do they'll kick you out.

"Basically every song ever recorded" is a red herring to strip you of ownership of your media.

To say nothing of all the playlists I've made that have holes blown in them like swiss cheese because the streaming rights got revoked. What if Spotify turns the way of Netflix?

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

#387

Post by honkler » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #99

raydiatian wrote: post #20

A concise explanation: functionalism is secondary to the attention economy for modern media platforms. Hard to advertise in a functional list grid, but yeah like fuck, I’m right there with you. It’s to the point where I’d rather just steal the album off of YouTube. At least there’s an ad-blocker.

The problem I see is that the "attention economy"'s end goal is still to be a marketing platform for real, paid products . It won't work in a world where there are no products and everything is an advertising platform - people won't be paying for the "privilege" of seeing ads. The market has been distorted by VCs and investors who are willing to throw shit tons of money towards anything that "grows" and generates eng…

read the book "subprime attention crisis"

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

#388

Post by quercusa » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 4:59 PM UTC

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #37

rizzaxc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks neat. is the project open source?

It's not just yet, but a quick look at my GitHub - https://github.com/tom-james-watson/ - should tell how that's likely to work out. The good thing is that the app is all client-side and so there's no need to monetize.

Just submitted your WikiTrivia game - very fun.

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

#389

Post by paol » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #169

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…

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

Yep, I did exactly the same. Saw the new UI, hated it, reinstalled the previous version and froze it. Still working fine.

apt version tells me the good version is 1:1.1.42.622 (the most recent is 1:1.1.84.716).

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

#390

Post by gilbetron » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

allturtles wrote: post #339

gilbetron wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The physicality of cassettes/records/CDs/mini-disks was fun, and listening to an entire album sometimes was really cool - but almost entirely not. Most albums were padded with crap to fill it up so people didn't feel ripped off. Remember, an album in 1985 cost $40 in 2022 dollars. Sure, there were occasional albums that the artist really thought about, including the slipcase, and the physicality of that I miss. But y…

> Most albums were padded with crap to fill it up so people didn't feel ripped off. This may be true, but you could always just buy the good albums. I owned a number of CDs/cassettes back in the day and I would listen to them and enjoy them front-to-back, over and over. Another aspect of it is that very often what's familiar sounds good, so by listening to the whole album, all of it (or more of it) would start to sou…

I 100% agree about the different experience of listening to good/great/amazing albums and the benefits of doing so. It's just that it is a pretty rare experience, particularly these days! A definite downside of our current music situation is that making an album like that is something that is really exceptional, since people rarely listen to music in that manner anymore. However, I wonder if the total number of "holistic" albums are greater now, just because there is far more music being made? :thinking-emoji:

I wore out my Synchronicity tape back in the 80s :) Listened to the album randomly a couple of months ago and it is spooky how the experience re-asserted itself into my being. I just know every nook and cranny of the album.