Spotify - anyone heard of it?

i used to prefer Rdio quite a bit, it was a comparative pleasure to use, but it's pretty buggy these days. and it's an absolute mess if cell reception tends to come and go (ie, subways).

that being said, if you tend to use it through a desktop app it's fine. i tend to like the UI a lot more than spotify so that's why i stick with it.

get out the door, start walking to work. fire up spotify and do a search for "joan jett" (don't judge me!) and spotify alerts me: you are controlling (your home computer)! do you want to continue, or listen here? i figured "listen here" meant on my phone, so i chose that, but it didn't work. the song kept stopping, and switching back to "thriller"! i'd start "hate myself for loving you again and again, but it kept stopping and switching back.

Is it possible that your kids were on your computer trying to play Thriller at the same time?

the remote play is easily the best newish feature, being able to get up and leave without more than a seconds pause, & my gf can dj for me while I go to the shops

Probably foolish of me to pursue this, but what the hell: Jeff, what features that you used got taken out of the mobile version? Most of the missing-feature complaints I know about have to do with the new desktop version...

Primarily starring tracks (and unstarring on mobile, since playlists don't allow me to easily remove the currently playing track from mobile, I have to go in and edit the playlist). And it would be real nice to have the ability to play all the music that is on my device without randomly skipping tracks. Bring back that feature!!!

I've calmed down today. I'm probably not leaving Spotify. At least not this week.

Is it possible that your kids were on your computer trying to play Thriller at the same time?

well yes, obviously!

Yeah, stars are, as you've probably guessed, not very likely to return in their exact original form. But this idea of a personal rotation, which you were using stars to produce, seems super valuable to me, so I'll continue pushing for some new (and hopefully even better) version of that.

i just use the "recently played" view for that, and it works well, although it forces me to dig through whole albums.

the greatest thing about the stars for me was that you could set the whole starred playlist to be offline, so it was just a big flat list of individual songs that i had actively picked out for special attention that i could listen to in a cave if necessary.

I'm kind of not feeling Spotify anymore. Just about ready to pull the plug, but I'll probably see how it goes for a few more months.

Mostly personal reasons, but:

(1) I thought by discovering more music, I would have more to listen to. Spotify has just reassured me that there is so much crap out there. I listen to so much bad music and get tired of it
(2) Because of that, I only listen to a popular track or two and if I like it, I'll listen to the album, if not, I'll skip it altogether. But I can do this with YouTube already. And Spotify takes a longer time/too long to put new music on their service
(3) So I'm still 'researching' music--reading about a band or musician and stuff before I commit to listening fully. So it's not like Spotify is saving me time
(4) A lot of the stuff I like is not on there anymore or never was. So I've been downloading music a lot again. What motivates me even more to get rid of it is that the person I share the account with has bands that were all just recently removed completely (no albums/singles anymore)

Whatever. I can save $10 and use it for something better

I have a "To Listen" playlist that I use the same way, but putting stuff on it requires more taps than starring used to, and I basically only ever take stuff off of it from my laptop. Not ideal. But the offline part works great, and Recently Played made it even easier for me to get back to it. And I do at times have multiple specialized To Listen lists, which wasn't possible with one Starred list.

But like I said, I think there's better stuff we could do to facilitate these kinds of listening patterns instead of merely tolerating them...

xpost

There is an amazing amount of crap, but for me the amount of great music is far more surprising than the amount of crap. This is true of any of the major services, not Spotify specifically, but if you're interested in widening your musical world again, I recommend poking around everynoise.com and/or the Sorting Hat (http://everynoise.com/spotify_new_releases.html). I have absolutely no trouble finding way more exciting new music every week than I can actually listen to...

cool, thanks glenn mcdonald.

though i actually just went ahead and cancelled my subscription right now. i don't know maybe i'm just not feeling like listening to music in general? definitely not specific to spotify, you're right

i bookmarked that link, though! thanks!

Good thing I don't work on commission.

wonder if the social aspects of spotify cause greater lag than grabbing tunes. seems like the speed bottleneck when starting up is gathering up all of my friend and playlist info from the *~cloud~*

On the mobile app, has anyone else noticed that the random is not very random? At least a few times, I've gotten the same sequence of songs a couple of times.

there is a web tool to import spotify playlists to rdio.

i imported the ilx 102 best tracks of 2014 spotify playlist to rdio. it matched 92 for me with a US account, so i guess 10 are missing from rdio (incl. that's not me, scandalously)

that's my data. bye.

delightful morbsian exit

the greatest thing about the stars for me was that you could set the whole starred playlist to be offline, so it was just a big flat list of individual songs that i had actively picked out for special attention that i could listen to in a cave if necessary.
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Thursday, April 16, 2015 1:23 PM (Yesterday)

Yeah i don't know, stars are more a temporary thing for me if anything. I mean, the times I feel like listening to MC Breed are not the same times I feel like listening to Eric Carmen

Perhaps this has been discussed in another thread, I realise I am a few days late, but christ this is nuts:

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6531918/portisheads-geoff-barrow-says-he-earned-just-2500-from-34-million-streams

The British took to his Twitter account to blast Apple, YouTube, Spotify and “especially” his label Universal Music for “selling our music so cheaply.”

What else have The British done?

lord my Albums list is getting ridiculous, would love to have multiple folders of Albums... like analogous to playlists of songs... even some style/genre sorting option would be cool, it could incorporate the microgenre tags from glenn's sorting hat.

is there a way to make the mobile app stream in extreme quality over wifi and normal quality over cellular?
this is my dream feature.

Latest Windows desktop "upgrade" finally made me go back to 0.8.5 and disable updates. The final straws were lack of ctrl+F and (seriously!?) inability to modify column widths.

then I was all HELLO OLD FRIEND why on earth have I not done this before? Desktop Spotify c. 2012 is a beautiful little application; not only compared to the current clunky webwrap debacle, but on its own terms.

Some rando used my email address to create a free account, so I emailed customer service to have it deleted, and got this response back (where "xxxxxxxx" is my email address):

We've checked on the email address "xxxx✧✧✧@icl✧✧✧.c✧✧" and can confirm that it has an account which is "xxxxxxxx-4". Since you've said that someone used your email address, may I please know what email address or username is it?

I... what?

WHY DOES THIS PIECE OF SHIT SOFTWARE NEVER RECOGNIZE MY IPHONE WHEN I PLUG IT IN. WHY DOES THIS PIECE OF SHIT SOFTWARE SEEM TO BE COMPLETELY INCAPABLE OF HANDLING MY LOCAL FILES. FECES.

Really, really makes me appreciate iTunes. Can't wait for apple to start their streaming thing.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-Desktop-Linux-Mac-and/No-device-menu-in-the-new-update/m-p/1065741#M116532

Oh, any indicate that your phone is connected has been removed. NBD.

Evidently, there is no more wired sync? That's incredibly stupid when I'm trying to sync a thousand or so local files.

I expect the inability to handle local files now is just a precursor to removing that feature.

I love when you are syncing via wifi, the app has to be open and the screen on. And it takes hours, so you're just sitting there with spotify on constantly tapping your screen so it doesn't go to sleep.

yeah, it's bad

mog was already pretty good. I switched to spotify bc mog ipad app didn't seem to have the programming support, ironically.

Does anyone else have trouble with downgraded Spotify continuing to try to upgrade even after following the instructions? I don't think I missed anything...

You must have missed a step. Those txt files should stop any attempts to upgrade.

Weird, the txt files are in the folder, read-only, but after maybe 5 minutes the Spotify_new application will reappear, along with the real .sig file.

The jig is up!

while we're in this zone: is it normal for there to be 3-4 separate spotify.exe processes running, at like 30MB each (not counting the "web helper")? not the biggest deal in the world since firefox takes like half a gig for NO REASON all the time (need to fucking switch to something else at this point, also flash crashes constantly and fucking homestarrunner videos from 13 years ago play with huge lag). but anyway, annoying. this started, i think, right around the time of the upgrade, which was also when spotify decided to 'forget' that i told it not to open automatically on startup.

it really is amazing how crappy and bloated they have made this program.

Xpost not to prolong an off topic note but does flash crash like a mofo on other browsers as well? It's definitely become a liability for me on Firefox too

i really don't think i'll ever convince spotify on my tablet that i don't want to listen in shuffle. baffling.

Notifications not working on desktop player and no notification emails since April 23rd.

current routine to start spotify desktop

1. Start Spotify
2. Stop Spotify
3. Open task manager
4. Kill Spotify processes
5. Start Spotify

Cool feature

charmingly temperamental program

Weird, the txt files are in the folder, read-only, but after maybe 5 minutes the Spotify_new application will reappear, along with the real .sig file.

Check that the files don't have an actual .txt extension; they have to be Spotify_new.exe and Spotify_new.exe.sig.

To check this, you might need to change your view settings to display file name extensions, as this generally doesn't happen by default in Windows.

Same on Mac btw, i had to remove the txt extension from the terminal.

Yeah, they don't have the txt extension. No one else seems to have this issue, and the instructions are pretty simple, I'm kind of baffled.

spotify made you, man. get to the safe house.

Weird, I haven't had any of the problems being discussed here. I'm on an i7 with a ton of RAM, though.

I also used onimo's startup procedure for awhile, but I discovered that the desktop app eventually sorts itself out if you wait a few minutes. It is hilarious that it starts up immediately after you kill all of the processes, though. Feels like there's a bottleneck in the data center for whatever info spotify gathers on startup, but it just gives up on gathering it if you just kill it once?

The instructions don't spell this out, but you need to download and install the program, but not then run it, then do the two text files, and THEN run the newly intalled SPotify for the first time.