Spotify - anyone heard of it?

excellent!

okay here's the question: every time i update a playlist on spotify either by rearranging the tracks or adding new music, it does NOT update the tracks in my mobile (ipad/iphone) playlists... it adds the song to the bottom of the playlist. The only workaround for me is to create a temp playlist, dump the reorganized music there, erase the prior playlist's contents and update with the contents of the temp playlist. That works but it's a consistent hassle. Any easy way to fix this that I'm missing? Or is this something that needs to be programmed?
Am i the only one in the world who cares?

Hmm. My playlists update fine on all clients, and I'm not aware of any bug like that. Are you sure you don't have the playlist set to be sorted some alternate way on either the desktop or mobile?

hm. well, i'm organizing it alphabetically by artist... is that something you can do within the mobile playlist? That's where i'm having the problem... although I just discovered the manual edit option which is helpful! but doesn't quite fix the problem naturally.

Ah, yeah, that's why. In the mobile version, drag the playlist downwards to reveal the filter box, tap the little three-line icon to the right of it, and pick Sort By: Artist.

When you add tracks to a playlist sorted this way, they are inserted last in the "natural" order, which explains what you were seeing.

OMG, had _no_ idea that option existed. Thanks much, huge help.
and not to bite the hand that feeds or anything but that is really really not intuitive!

i wasn't even aware that "filter" option was there; would've assumed those functions would be under the ellipses menu

Ha, I found the filter a little while back, figured everyone else already knew about it and I was late to the party otherwise I would have mentioned it here.

i daresay i count as a "heavy user" if anyone does and i couldn't find the dang thing!

UI design is not my role at Spotify...

new desktop update looks nice. not sure when it rolled out but mine updated last week or so. got rid of that problem where scrolling would jump to the top of the playlist after switching between playlists or switching to an artists page and coming back.

On a similar note I wish I could move playlists into folders, or sort them within folders, on my phone or tablet. I can organize things on my computer but not on my mobile devices.

i must say that i kinda dig the Track_ed. monthly mailer as I'm a sucker for meaningless stats.

567 Unique Tracks This Month
321 Different Artists This Month

The Artists You Played the Most This Month:
Daby Touré
Daniel Bachman
Bulgarian State Television Female Choir
Lizzo
Dasha Rush

How do you get that?

so here's an ignorant question: how are playlists SUPPOSED to work across devices?
(yeah, I googled, but it's weirdly hard to find precise info)

I have ipod (super old version of app), iphone (old version of app), and desktop (up to date).

if I delete a playlist on one device, should it vanish on them all?
if i update on one device, should it update on all?
or should I be using desktop only for all changes?

i add and remove on iphone and ipad (ancient devices, don't know about app version), hardly ever use the desktop, it all syncs fine for me.

adding or removing tracks/playlists will be reflected across all devices

ulysses, I just got that as well, hadn't seen it before.

My stats were:

1066 unique tracks
438 different artists

Most played:

Weyes Blood
Simone Dinnerstein
Mr. Oizo
Blood Orange
Autechre

It doesn't indicate what portion of these tracks I was actually awake for and how many I snoozed through

is there any way to see a count of how many songs i have saved in my library? ive been worried for a while that i'm approaching the 10k limit but would be nice to know for sure

I've made another fantastic playlist. Please do yourself a favor and listen to it. My musical taste is so good it will bring happiness and joy to your ears.

The link is here.

Okay, I was lukewarm on the previous one, but this one looks sweet!

thanks guys--I resorted to deleting and re-adding the app and it's fixed the problem on the ipod...

xp to Marko, spotify sends it out to "select clientele" which i guess means POWER USERS WUT WUT

Another useless stat-hound asks: what's the track_ed monthly mailer thing?

as noted above, it's just advertorial eblast experimentation by the look of it
http://i.imgur.com/nd1hRcf.png

Ah, Ok - gotcha, cheers. I'm a premium user! I want one.

It's a smart bonus. I want more!

Anyone know how you can see who is following a playlist of yours?

Sadly, you can't.

You used to be able to... why'd that change?

hey glenn, curious question - do you happen to know if the invention of the Spotify Connect chipset was initially sort of like an accidental byproduct of technological development necessary to restraint user playback on multiple devices w/ same account? (account sharing)

A couple of weeks ago I had single and album versions of Chris Bell's I Am The Cosmos in my Discover Weekly, just three songs apart. My DW has always leant pretty heavily on This Mortal Coil and their source material, but this was next level.

No, Connect is not related to preventing one account from being used on multiple devices at once.

Okay, cool. It's a nice feature.

Taking a while to get used to the repositioning of controls in the new desktop UI. Feel like that all takes up far too much space now.

agreed; much preferred the cd button setup.

umm 'collapse folder' triangle on the right now? is there any other UI on earth that does that? wth

Spotify is writing massive amounts of junk data to storage drives

For almost five months—possibly longer—the Spotify music streaming app has been assaulting users' storage devices with enough data to potentially take years off their expected lifespans. Reports of tens or in some cases hundreds of gigabytes being written in an hour aren't uncommon, and occasionally the recorded amounts are measured in terabytes. The overload happens even when Spotify is idle and isn't storing any songs locally.

The behavior poses an unnecessary burden on users' storage devices, particularly solid state drives, which come with a finite amount of write capacity. Continuously writing hundreds of gigabytes of needless data to a drive every day for months or years on end has the potential to cause an SSD to die years earlier than it otherwise would. And yet, Spotify apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux have engaged in this data assault since at least the middle of June, when multiple users reported the problem in the company's official support forum.

"This is a *major* bug that currently affects thousands of users," Spotify user Paul Miller told Ars. "If for example, Castrol Oil lowered your engine's life expectancy by five to 10 years, I imagine most users would want to know, and that fact *should* be reported on."

Three Ars reporters who ran Spotify on Macs and PCs had no trouble reproducing the problem reported not only in the above-mentioned Spotify forum but also on Reddit, Hacker News, and elsewhere. Typically, the app wrote from 5 to 10 GB of data in less than an hour on Ars reporters' machines, even when the app was idle. Leaving Spotify running for periods longer than a day resulted in amounts as high as 700 GB.

!!! I wonder if that's why my tablet has a mysteriously low amount of free space for no seeming reason, even as Spotify has been running like a dead snail.

yeah, spotify on my phone tends to be very slow starting up and is constantly trying load and the re-load files for some reason. I haven't noticed it taking up an unusual amount of space, but then I added a 200 GB memory card to my phone specifically to manage my spotify files.

I just checked and spotify has written about 800 GB of data since I last booted it up last week, so not as bad as some people but still very bad. This is a very serious issue and probably cost at least some people an SSD.

!!! I wonder if that's why my tablet has a mysteriously low amount of free space for no seeming reason, even as Spotify has been running like a dead snail.

This bug doesn't cause Spotify to take up extra space, it just causes it to rewrite to the same space constantly, which can cause premature hard drive failure.

As far as I can tell from what's out there this only affects the PC, mac and linux clients. iOS and android apps should be ok.

What the fuck. How do you check this on mac?

according to someone on the ars technica forum there is a way to work around this:

If you look at API calls in Process Explorer (or similar), it's pretty easy to see that a bug is causing the SQLite DB to be repeatedly compacted. (VACUUM'd, see https://sqlite.org/lang_vacuum.html).

Honestly, I think the damage of this quantity of writes to a modern SSD is a bit overblown, but it's certainly a drag on system resources and is concerning if many apps did this for long periods of time.

If you're really concerned, you work around this by causing the VACUUM statement to fail.

On windows, you'd open libcef.dll in a hex editor and change each occurrence of "VACUUM;" to "abcdef;"

On mac, you can do this in the terminal:
perl -pi -e 's/VACUUM;/abcdef;/g' /Applications/Spotify.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotify

Hope this helps.

silverfish, I can't speak to the specific bug, but it certainly seems like spotify is constantly trying to write to my SD card on my android phone. It keeps showing that it wants to load between 500 and 1000 files.

New version fixes this tho.

My tablet copy of Spotify was taking up 240 MB which I do think seems a bit high for something that as far as I know really shouldn't be storing music of any kind. I mean maybe a million tiny icon-sized album art images add up but....

Hey my newest Top 40 playlist is up. Please listen because it is fantastic. It's my utopian alternate universe Top 40. This one contains Mott the Hoople, Elmore James Her Royal Harness and more. Listen, like, follow, tell all your friends and bask in the glory of these wonderful songs.

Thanks kornrulez - better thread for those might be: My Spotify playlists, let me show you them

What's up with: A special thank you from _____