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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?

#41

Post by lemursage »

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!

Agreed, I feel that in the case of Netflix et al., it's just orders of magnitude more ridiculous -- may I just get the list of the films instead of being force spoon-fed crap content, please? I don't even know how to begin to tell the recommender engine that it's completely missing my preferences. That would be somewhat digestible if their search experience wasn't terrible as well -- no facet search, no dynamic category browsing? What the heck.

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

#43

Post by lapser »

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.

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

#45

Post by blenderdt »

Today everything is focused on making money. The focus on money makes the experience good for the ones that make the money, but for the end user it means everything turns into one giant ad.

That's why Spotify uses tiles instead of tables. The tiles are important for the content producer, not for the Spotify user. A tile can scream at you 'Listen to me!', a row in a table cannot do this.

It shows that Spotify is making more money from content creators than content consumers.

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

#46

Post by orestis »

The truncated text is a huge peeve of mine with designers. I get that it’s hard to design a nice grid if you have to account for text that wrapped etc, but not everyone is called Tom Smith, and not all titles are 20 characters long.

A designer I know advocated that users should be coaxed into using shorter titles and descriptions so that the UI looks good. It just makes me seethe.

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

#47

Post by californical »

dm270 wrote: post #14

I don't know if others saw the same behavior. I'm on Android. And I feel like I'm in some sort of a big A/B test regarding their app. One day, the interface changes one way, couple days later it changes back. Constantly some menu or behavior changes. It's super frustrating. Lately it seems to have stabilized, but it really made me feel like a guinea pig. And maybe that's my inner old person speaking, but most of the…

Yeah I switched to Tidal when I learned about Spotify’s data sharing and privacy concerns a little over a year ago, but I was also so frustrated with Spotify’s UI always changing in frustrating ways and making it worse. They’d break features that I used often (playlist sorting broke, for example). I’d contact customer support and they’d go through this whole “uninstall and reinstall the app, does it still happen?” …YES, it’s another bug for no reason! Stop breaking my shit!

With Spotify, it would often be an update that looks pretty but was harder to use, which is the exact opposite of what I care about… I’m here to listen to music as fast as possible and get on with my life, not scroll through giant menus with way too much spacing, when it used to all fit on one screen.

There are still usability issues with Tidal that are similar to Spotify (hard to find something specific, etc), but they basically never change anything about the core UI, it just always works the exact same with some minor additions here&there. And honestly it’s reduced my frustration dramatically.

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

#48

Post by danielovichdk »

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 music just keeps going.

Everybody can understand a list of songs, even my grandma who's pushing 84. So we battle out songs on each of ours computers, but we don't use Spotify any more.

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

#49

Post by LilBytes »

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.

Followed on Twitter and GH, your screengrabs look awesome. Looking forward to testing it out <3
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