also if you're a label reissuing an album and you need to spend more than 5 seconds to remember what year the music was originally released, then maybe don't deserve to be on the internet anyway
― Karl Malone, Sunday, 12 April 2015 00:48 (nine years ago) link
glenn correct me if i'm wrong but my impression is that a lot of the adding to the spotify library is automatized. i've seen the same album on the sorting hat page like 5 months in a row now (World Music Tour · The Culture of Traditions, Vol. 2). obv they just keep resubmitting it, maybe under different names or whatever, and it automatically gets put into the system again.
― Mordy, Sunday, 12 April 2015 00:49 (nine years ago) link
so even asking spotify to stop automating any % of that would either mean a) smaller library, b) cost more money
Yes, the field in question is, in fact, already labeled exactly "Original Release Date". And then there are separate fields for copyright and publishing dates/credits, and then also separate on-sale dates for every region. That dreamy future in which the labels "still occasionally mess it up" is the reality you are already living in. Putting the onus on the labels and post-label cleanup are not two different alternatives, they're two unavoidable steps in the same unreliable process.
Which doesn't make it any less annoying, I realize. But we're doing what we can.
xpost
And yes, we get the same albums sent to us many, many times. We try to deal with that, too.
― glenn mcdonald, Sunday, 12 April 2015 01:04 (nine years ago) link
have you considered sending around a crew of bruisers to punch people in the face when the submit bad metadata? i've often dreamed of that!
― Karl Malone, Sunday, 12 April 2015 01:08 (nine years ago) link
we could be those bruisers
― And let’s say a new Hozier comes along, and Spotify outbids you (Sufjan Grafton), Sunday, 12 April 2015 01:31 (nine years ago) link
and will later be portrayed by Jonah Hill
― Hammer Smashed Bagels, Sunday, 12 April 2015 01:34 (nine years ago) link
this whole spotify vs. tidal vs. beats streetfight makes me so glad i've stayed within my itunes comfort zone and don't have to worry about which artist's exclusivity deal lands where. i'm just really hoping that when apple x beats is complete the roll-out doesn't simply take the form of an itunes update that doesn't let me add mp3s to my library ever again (the death of the ipood classic was a dark portent)
― soyrev, Sunday, 12 April 2015 01:46 (nine years ago) link
haha ipood
― soyrev, Sunday, 12 April 2015 01:47 (nine years ago) link
you paid money for mp3s, though
― And let’s say a new Hozier comes along, and Spotify outbids you (Sufjan Grafton), Sunday, 12 April 2015 03:46 (nine years ago) link
idk
― soyrev, Sunday, 12 April 2015 03:53 (nine years ago) link
let's not even get into the inability of seemingly every major music service to disambiguate between artists of the same name
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Sunday, 12 April 2015 12:42 (nine years ago) link
Of course the labels provide unique identifiers for each artist. Which everybody diligently uses when reviewing them or tweeting or whatever.
― glenn mcdonald, Sunday, 12 April 2015 12:52 (nine years ago) link
Sparks is a particularly funny example xp
― Dainger! High Doltage (wins), Sunday, 12 April 2015 14:10 (nine years ago) link
Have a horrible time trying to get spotify to recognize my mobile when plugged into my computer.
Where can I sign up to be a beta tester of this horrible software? If anything it will be cathartic for me to feel like I'm giving feedback through an official channel. Or hire me as a QA tester. I'll work for cheap.
― Jeff, Sunday, 12 April 2015 14:33 (nine years ago) link
I suspect part of the problem is Spotify doesn't handle large local file libraries well. The functions more or less normally until I try and access local files then the whole thing becomes an unresponsive piece of shit.
― Jeff, Sunday, 12 April 2015 14:36 (nine years ago) link
except local file libraries work great in older versions!
― Mordy, Sunday, 12 April 2015 14:37 (nine years ago) link
yeah I won't pay for spotify or any other service until they get the metadata thing solved---because I am silly I have spent a lot of time cleaning up my itunes library and if I could integrate that into some streaming service then that could work (maybe itunes beats w/e?) but I hate using the spotify client as it is today.
― droit au butt (Euler), Sunday, 12 April 2015 15:12 (nine years ago) link
I've got used to working around spotify's shortcomings but while we're complaining about it, another issue is the [un]navigability of artists with big discographies, especially older artists with material which has been reissued in x number of compilations. there's all this effort to curate playlists etc. but there are lots of individual artists with hundreds of hours of recordings which are very difficult to wade through. someone like duke ellington is not well-served by arranging things by album & some sort of organized timeline way of looking through/filtering his recordings would be so much more user-friendly but I suspect we're doomed to have 18 versions of the same recording and an unusable compilations section
― ogmor, Sunday, 12 April 2015 16:26 (nine years ago) link
crowdsourcing, btw, would also be great for being able to somehow downvote shitty rerecorded versions of things so they fall to the bottom of search results, but I don't see any way to make that happen without it also turning into conservatives downvoting all rap music or whatever.
― Doctor Casino, Sunday, 12 April 2015 16:36 (nine years ago) link
That's unlikely - look at RYM which is also based on crowdsourcing/voting and def doesn't downvote rap.
― Siegbran, Sunday, 12 April 2015 16:57 (nine years ago) link
Well, maybe not that, but some other possible downsides I guess? I basically would only trust this feature if it was used only by ILM types.
― Doctor Casino, Sunday, 12 April 2015 17:00 (nine years ago) link
ilm types downvoting all rock and indie?
― Eric Burdon & War, On Drugs (Cosmic Slop), Sunday, 12 April 2015 17:20 (nine years ago) link
while i am completely sympathetic to the urge to see crappy re-recordings blasted out of our way, they aren't just an annoyance for nerds like us - they represent independent record companies and artists looking for more income and rights. so even if spotify hadn't given equity to the majors - which would make vamoosing Cleopatra/Purple Pyramid type companies potential grounds for a collusion lawsuit - they're kind of a necessary evil if you actually care about things like artists rights
― da croupier, Sunday, 12 April 2015 17:28 (nine years ago) link
though again, as someone who's made more than his fair share of oldies playlists, i'd probably pop a beer if k-tel's redone crapola magically disappeared
― da croupier, Sunday, 12 April 2015 17:31 (nine years ago) link
someone like duke ellington is not well-served by arranging things by album & some sort of organized timeline way of looking through/filtering his recordings would be so much more user-friendly
well, quite, and the death of spotify apps makes me wonder if we've not just taken a huge step backwards
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Sunday, 12 April 2015 19:33 (nine years ago) link
eh i really don't mind that aspect, i'm ok with spotify not being a music encyclopedia. the rest of the internet is pretty good at that.
― brimstead, Sunday, 12 April 2015 21:08 (nine years ago) link
organizing by dropdown tabs by label for each artist would go a long way towards making navigation easier.
― Premise ridiculous. Who have two potato? (forksclovetofu), Monday, 13 April 2015 01:49 (nine years ago) link
if you're a label reissuing an album and you need to spend more than 5 seconds to remember what year the music was originally released, then maybe don't deserve to be on the internet anyway
a lot of labels list the current year as the original release date for reissues on purpose, for any number of reasons -- chief among them, i have always assumed, being that it forces the album to show up on top of an artist's discography in online services. labels aren't stupid. they know what they're doing.
i've worked at a couple streaming services, and cleaning up labels' metadata mistakes, omissions and white lies could be a full-time job for an army of humans, and they'd still never catch up.
― fact checking cuz, Tuesday, 14 April 2015 05:22 (nine years ago) link
that actually sounds like a nightmare to me. if i'm looking for a certain frank sinatra or duke ellington or guided by voices album, i don't want to have to go through five tabs trying to figure out which label put that one out.
but some kind of organizational system would definitely help. some of those long discographies are all but impossible to navigate. but i get that it isn't easy for services to do. that's manual labor. plus it requires making all sorts of subjective decisions that any two random music geeks could spend their lifetime arguing about. if a service could figure out a way to do it with crowdsourcing, yeah, maybe that.
― fact checking cuz, Tuesday, 14 April 2015 05:29 (nine years ago) link
cleaning up labels' metadata mistakes, omissions and white lies could be a full-time job for an army of humans, and they'd still never catch up
How might one get this job, btw? I'm looking presently.
― Johnny Fever, Tuesday, 14 April 2015 05:32 (nine years ago) link
yeah artists with big discographies... i just have to search for the album title too.
― brimstead, Tuesday, 14 April 2015 06:22 (nine years ago) link
flac needs to happen. mp3s just don't do it. we shouldn't be regressing music quality with each new format like this. they should do a thing where you could pay a small fee for each album u wanted in flac. i don't need all flac, but i would maybe go up to £15pm for all flac everything.
― Daukins (Arctic Noon Auk), Tuesday, 14 April 2015 07:41 (nine years ago) link
^ tidal astroturfing
― koogs, Tuesday, 14 April 2015 08:50 (nine years ago) link
Tidal is your friend. You can also search for composers in there. It's not perfect but it sure helps.
― longneck, Tuesday, 14 April 2015 08:50 (nine years ago) link
Cleaning up metadata would pretty much be my dream job.
― Jeff, Tuesday, 14 April 2015 11:03 (nine years ago) link
ctrl+f "remastered" DELETE ALL
― nashwan, Tuesday, 14 April 2015 11:29 (nine years ago) link
― Premise ridiculous. Who have two potato? (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, 14 April 2015 14:27 (nine years ago) link
New Spotify issue with the mobile app, it just seems to skip certain songs. Like it will transition from one song to the next one, the cover art will splash on the screen and then immediately go to the next song. I go back and it will just go to the next song again.
― Jeff, Tuesday, 14 April 2015 14:28 (nine years ago) link
not as a default, as an option if you need it while searching
ah, ok. i'd co-sign that.
― fact checking cuz, Wednesday, 15 April 2015 03:33 (nine years ago) link
weird thing happened to me this morning. i was listening to michael jackson on spotify, plumbed through the stereo. my kids insist on this.
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.
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, 15 April 2015 10:53 (nine years ago) link
that remote control thing is great, never had a problem with choosing 'listen here' to switch back to the current device.
― ledge, Wednesday, 15 April 2015 12:46 (nine years ago) link
actually i think i have had a problem, stopping and restarting playback switches playback from the remote device to the current device. and you can't control the volume remotely.
― ledge, Wednesday, 15 April 2015 12:47 (nine years ago) link
At least once I've been unable to convince my tablet that no, I did not want to be listening to this album in shuffle; my hunch was that it had to do with it being halfway synched up with my PC (which wasn't playing along or anything, but when I used it later it was showing a song from that album as the 'current' track)? But I have no idea.
― Doctor Casino, Wednesday, 15 April 2015 14:40 (nine years ago) link
I think I'm almost done with Spotify. It's completely infuriating how they have slowly removed features that I use and the releases are buggier and buggier. They do not deserve my money.
What are my alternatives? Should I wait of the Apple/Beats streaming thing?
― Jeff, Wednesday, 15 April 2015 17:59 (nine years ago) link
I haven't tried Rdio in a long time, but surely they're up to having a comparable catalogue at this point.
― Johnny Fever, Wednesday, 15 April 2015 18:00 (nine years ago) link
you can't go back to an earlier version as described upthread? xp
― sleeve, Wednesday, 15 April 2015 18:13 (nine years ago) link
Not with mobile, which is what I use most of the time.
― Jeff, Wednesday, 15 April 2015 18:13 (nine years ago) link
ah, didn't know that
― sleeve, Wednesday, 15 April 2015 18:19 (nine years ago) link
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...
― glenn mcdonald, Wednesday, 15 April 2015 18:46 (nine years ago) link