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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?

#391

Post by Reason077 »

paol wrote: post #389
Reason077 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Mine's 1.1.58.820 with ui.experience_override="classic" set in Spotify's prefs file.

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

#392

Post by mistermann »

anticristi wrote: post #237
srrr wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 years ago when I worked in the music streaming space we also had to push users to playlists instead of albums. The reason, in Germany at least, was that a playlist only payed 1/10 the royalties to the GEMA [1] than an album playthrough. Playlists were classified as ¨radio¨ and thus a performance of the radio station but an album was the performance of the original artist. Our interface was optimized for low royalt…

Thanks for highlighting this! I was getting the feeling that search has become increasingly crappier. Not just Spotify, but also in other places like Google, Facebook and DuckDuckGo. Search for anything and you'll get something "pausibly deniability" close to what you typed, but optimized for metrics that are way beyond the user's comprehension. I feel like singling out Facebook, the worst offender: Their search is o…

> I was getting the feeling that search has become increasingly crappier.

Whether that is a consequence of it becoming harder, or by design is the important question. I can think of a few reasons an uninformed or misinformed general public would benefit some people.

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

#393

Post by b3morales »

> If there is a piece of information about a podcast that is the least useful, that would be the cover art.

Slightly disagree with this. When you're searching for something whose cover art you know well, the visual match is definitely the fastest way for you to get to it.

Truncating the title/track info on the other hand, I agree is pretty unforgivable.

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

#394

Post by fivre »

javajosh wrote: post #154
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…

>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…

The media of the day have always had an outsize influence on the format of music. The modern album _exists_ because LPs became available, and the format just kinda persisted because the media after were also limited to a particular length. We're used to this, but we just happened to be born well after the point where listening to music required hiring a chamber orchestra, and the music listened to was designed for that format.

I don't like the playlist (and now, TikTok)-driven market--I too prefer listening to a full album straight through--but there's not really anything more inherently musical about the formats that came before. For better or worse, that's just the nature of the industry.

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

#395

Post by rsanheim »

I refused to use Spotify from early on because it is so anti-album. The interface just sucks for playing albums, and its ridiculous that they haven't fixed it. Playlists are fine for parties or when you want to discover new music, but if you are doing more focused listening albums are the way to go.

I use Apple Music for streaming / high quality downloads while on the go or airplaying around the house, and Roon (https://roonlabs.com) for dedicated in-home album listening. Its definitely a more expensive combo than Spotify, but worth it.

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

#396

Post by UglyToad »

nightowl_games wrote: post #268

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'm definitely becoming one of the tin foil hat lot but since the redesign I've gone from perhaps 40 hours listening per week to almost zero but am too lazy to cancel the subscription.

By that metric I think the redesign has succeeded, I've soft churned but they get the subscription and pay out no royalties.

Never assign to malice yadda yadda yadda... but there's no way such an atrocious redesign doesn't have an ulterior motive. The designers have done their job well it's just optimizing for something else.

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

#397

Post by psyc »

vlunkr wrote: post #348
psyc wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Link to the thread? That description doesn't make sense to me.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Mac/Spotify-Connect...

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Turn-off-Spotify-Co...

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Connect-Make-S...

Look how the fuckers mark the second one “Solved” for their decision to do dick about it. Primo customer service.

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

#398

Post by corney91 »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #125
wasmitnetzen wrote: post #28

I recently switched to Deezer, and the app web and webapp are so much more usable. And you can still upload missing tracks and sync them to your phone!

Deezer is way better but the catalog is smaller too.

Personally I've not found that, I used Tune My Music to sync across 140 playlists of probably 10k songs from Spotify and not many came up as "not available". I have found their library for children's profiles more limited though.

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

#399

Post by gentleman11 »

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…

My main gripe against Spotify is how they collect your listening data and brag to investors about what they can infer about you based on it

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

#400

Post by joek1301 »

spockz wrote: post #83
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.

> 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? I thought it was just me! I did notice that sometimes when this happens the numbers being skipped are “this song is currently not available for playback” or some such message. I seem to listen to the same music a lot actually so just buying the CD would be more cost efficien…

Spotify shuffle is indeed not (uniformly) random, as confirmed by this blog post[1]. The post is eight years old, so it is highly possible the algorithm has changed.

[1]: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...

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