Spotify - anyone heard of it?

xp Anatol: Oh! It has started working again! What a relief.

No, I don't know much about Connect, and nothing at all about FireTV, but I know who does, and have passed word along...

Thank you.

Has the Connect thing mis-stepped up its game again with a recent update? I *really* want to just keep each device separate when it comes to playing (not lists etc obv); when I press play on my phone, I want my phone to play music, not my laptop or TV or toaster or whatevs. When I press play on the laptop, I want my laptop to play music, not my TV or toaster or phone or whatevs. Permute at will, it still holds.

Also, I'd like to be able to listen to e.g. Come On Pilgrim on my laptop or TV or toaster or whatevs over breakfast, without a risk of my screen flashing ladytits in the crowded bus when I take out my phone to check the time. (Example picked for delicacy.)

Am I just clumsy and has missed an dis-connect button somewhere?

Is there any way to drop a full playlist into another playlist without doing it song by song? I'm making weekly playlists of new music atm and would like to transfer them to a monthly one, but as they're all above 60 tracks it seems like a lot of work to do it track by track. This is one of the things that was very simple in google play music, which I've now put on hold to give spotify a chance.

On a nactual computer or a phone? If the former, select source playlist in left-hand column to get all the songs in the main view, select all the songs (using shift-click, ctrl-click, ctrl-A or your local OS equivalent where necessary), drag'em to the target playlist in the left-hand column?

Yeah. Easy on computer, not sure if it can be done on phone.

Oh thanks for the tip - I've tried to do this before but could only mark one song at a time for some reason. It worked now, so thanks a lot!

Also, I'd like to be able to listen to e.g. Come On Pilgrim on my laptop or TV or toaster or whatevs over breakfast, without a risk of my screen flashing ladytits in the crowded bus when I take out my phone to check the time. (Example picked for delicacy.)

You mean Surfer Rosa, right? I managed to find a way to fix this a few weeks ago by googling it up in spotify's forums. I think the solution involved turning off notifications for Spotify, which means that in addition to album cover not displaying on your lockscreen, you also can't see the title of the song that's currently playing unless you open the spotify app. Small sacrifice, imo.

Wish I could remember which album cover compelled me to look this up.

mobile spotify on 4G works almost flawlessly for me now - on 3G it tends not to work at all

Haha yes Surfer Rosa obv duh! :-D

Those two were commonly packaged together, no?

This articles is ...not that good... sort of misses the point, or something: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/19/slave-to-the-algorithm-how-music-fans-can-reclaim-their-playlists-from-spotify

ha, this motivated me to check my discover weekly for the first time in a while, and lo, I also had the leanover on my discover weekly. not my thing at all but still better than most of the dreck that I flick through every now and then. after some initial great finds it now feels almost totally unconnected to my listening and skews heavily towards a sort of cheap slickness. its much, much worse than the last.fm recommendations, not that I use that much either

Play your Spotify music without being connected to a smartphone
http://www.thefourohfive.com/music/article/play-your-spotify-music-without-being-connected-to-a-smartphone-145

Mighty - Kickstarter Campaign
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/51215664/mighty-streaming-music-without-your-phone

Mighty is the first and only device that plays your Spotify music without being connected to a smartphone. Lightweight, durable, and small enough to clip-on to any piece of clothing, it's the perfect device for your active life. Mighty comes equipped with Bluetooth and WiFi, is compatible with iPhones and Androids, and can play 48 hours of music without any internet connection. All for under $80.

I like the idea, but I really doubt they will ship that this year.

yeah, let me know when that's in production and i'll likely buy one off the rack.

did spotify ever give a reason for getting rid of the star button? it was so convenient to be listening to a random playlist, hear a song you like, and take one second to star it and save it on the fly - esp great for my commute when i hear a song on the "today's top hits" playlist or w/e and want to remember to check out that song/artist. people keep bringing it up on the official forums and they keep saying it's not in work. they clearly had to go out of their way to get rid of an established feature...can't figure out why they did though.

you can do the same thing with the + button

and "Your Music - Songs" playlist is the starred playlist

but its not the same thing

you could write a script called "star" and use the web api?

the + button saves it to your music, not to a playlist, so if you have 100s/1000s of albums/songs saved that doesn't put it in a convenient place when you want to look it up later

i know there is still a playlist called "starred" but without the star functionality it's just like any other playlist, you have to hit options -> add to playlist -> pick playlist to put it there. not very convenient, particularly when on the go.

if there is a workaround that requires you to use the web interface vs the client then idk if that would be worth it for me ino.

yes, I was joking because it would be more work. + and saved songs works well for me. More seriously, I suppose an app could be used to copy all of the single tracks in saved songs to the starred playlist every once in awhile.

Don't even get me started on stars. Still the primary reason Spotify no longer gets my money.

let me know when that's in production and i'll likely buy one off the rack.

― ulysses, Friday, February 26, 2016 12:32 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my discover weekly's have been bad and seem to have gotten stuck in a stylistic rut

is there any way to improve this other than adding a ton of songs i like to my library?

does it learn when i skip songs after a few seconds? unlike rdio there's no way to "disklike" a song, is there?

I do wish there was a way of telling Spotify that I'm not into Lion Babe or Polica.

glenn know when that hotline bling

maybe my webcam captures the look on my face as a feature of the training songspace? I've been scolding my computer as I skip tracks just in case.

Does adding songs to your library actually affect Discover Weekly? I thought it was only based on the songs you've actually listened to.

xp more seriously, a skip would probably be weighed less since people might skip around just to get a feel for the playlist or something.

Discover Weekly is informed by your listening, not your library. So the bad news is that you can't force it to change by any quick tricks. But the good news is that if you listen to more music you like, and explore more kinds of music that aren't in that rut, it should pick up on those cues and shift along with you.

And yes, people skip for a lot of different reasons, so we're pretty conservative about what use we make of skips. They're a little better a signal in aggregate than for individual listeners, but even in aggregate there can be insidious complicating factors.

So then my method of making a massive playlist of a bunch stuff I really like and playing it on shuffle as I go to sleep but with the sound off is a good one?

Yes, if you keep doing that consistently, we should pretty quickly zero in on other music you will enjoy playing with the sound off while you sleep.

This, I assume, describes the guts of what would become Discover Weekly: http://erikbern.com/2015/01/13/scala-data-pipelines-for-music-recommendations/

maybe a better version, since it mentions the NLP and audio pieces: http://www.slideshare.net/MrChrisJohnson/from-idea-to-execution-spotifys-discover-weekly

I'm shocked that user libraries don't go into it! I feel like I used Spotify very little before Discover Weekly came out, but it still seemed dead-on from the start.

yeah, that first one was way too simple. very interesting, though, thanks!

I meant the recommendation algorithm part (not the whole thing) of the first deck was simple, i.e. it didn't seem to explicitly account for genre anywhere.

actually, nevermind. The second deck just goes into more depth.

Yeah that second one is really interesting. Seems like a pretty solid setup.

The discovery playlist function has been massively improved imo -- I actually look forward to checking them out now.

A few obvious ones this week like Sonic Youth - Cross the Breeze, Kraftwerk, Tortoise, but this is still much less obvious than the obvious stuff of yore.

"Spotify has launched a new music discovery service called Fresh Finds, which aims to shine a light on artists before they make it big."
http://www.factmag.com/2016/03/02/spotify-fresh-finds-playlists-launched/

The features launches today (March 2) with six playlists to choose from: Fire Emoji (hip-hop), Basement (electronic), Hiptronix (vocal pop), Six Strings (guitar driven), Cyclone (experimental) and the more general Fresh Finds, focusing on “breakout tracks” across the other five playlists.

maybe a better version, since it mentions the NLP and audio pieces: http://www.slideshare.net/MrChrisJohnson/from-idea-to-execution-spotifys-discover-weekly

this is interesting, and namechecks some modern stuff (e.g. they have a screenshot of the word2vec paper from NIPS 2013), but it's not obvious to me which of those approaches they're actually using (collaborative filtering, NLP like word2vec on unstructured non-spotify text, dimensionality reduction/latent spaces, and "deep learning" (lol) on the audio). in particular, i heard the audio analysis stuff had turned out to be a dead end. is there anything more technical on how they're doing this?

ok slide 46 suggests they're using all of them, or at least plan to use all of them

also hints that they want to pay attention to saves and skips but as confirmed in this thread they are not currently doing that

🤔

it looked to me like they're using collaborative filtering, and the other NLP stuff is used for describing features of songs (beyond what publishers provide) and therefore user preferences. So maybe it's collaborative filtering with implicit feedback but with a lot of cool machine learning stuff also going into that feedback?

audio analysis stuff had turned out to be a dead end

you don't say - i am stunned that analyzing key signatures and beats per minute did not result in great recommendations

Spotify is great for parties (Pointer Sisters!), but on my own, I spend more time with (listen longer) and get more out of music that I've paid for and own. I guess just the breadth of selection and access is quite paralyzing and distracting to me.

it looked like NLP to describe songs and user preferences (from playlists?) -> dimensionality reduction to describe user preference alignment -> feeding this alignment into collaborative filtering for recommendation

Spotify certainly knows I had a thing for "Some Velvet Morning" at one point in my life - I've had Nancy & Lee doing it twice and Lydia Lunch & Rowland S Howard last week. Looking forward to the Entombed, Vanilla Fudge and Slowdive versions on future Weekly playlists.