Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I've heard google play integration w sonos is pretty good too - i have an iphone so apple music is probably easier to manage but it seems like adding your own music is a lot more straightforward with apps that use your phone's music library by default.

Sonos + a free Google Play account is fantastic for the most part. Everything I bring into iTunes is uploaded automatically to Google Play and accessible through Sonos within a few minutes.

Not being able to sort by recently added is a dire choice.

another data point: the only times I have ever sorted by recently added were misclicks (easy to do on a phone) and whenever it happens I freak out and try to remember how to un-sort by recently added because it fucks up my playlist order, so good riddance

I've never been able to sort playlists by anything except on desktop, which is really annoying when you know a certain song is in a given playlist but it's got 500 songs and it's locked into sorting by date added...

You can sort playlists and also search them in the mobile app. When you open a Playlist, scroll up and you'll find those options.

so on the android app, spotify got rid of the Play All feature that allowed you to shuffle all the playlists grouped under a folder. This is seriously messing up my whole system that I've had for years. I'm at the point where I need to start thinking about some other music app because this has gotten steadily worse and worse, stripping away valuable features over time.

maybe you could just find an old apk?

maybe, I'll need to figure out how to do that. I'd really like to find a music streaming app that doesn't keep hosing the features I use the most.

something like this might work http://www.apkmirror.com/uploads/?q=spotify-ltd (if you're on Android that is)

yikes, I use that feature all the time, still available for the iphone thankfully

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/17/spotify-to-restrict-some-music-to-paying-subscribers-only

Surprised they didn't do this a long time ago. I guess now they've got a lot of people into it, the gamble is that many of them will pony up the cash for premium.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mOPkCwWrwvo/VZhgY6mMhiI/AAAAAAAAJPw/jn6zGHSDF7g/s1600/anigif.gif

Ha. I just went for premium yesterday, but it sure wasn't so I could listen to fucking pop records - it was just that the commercials, which were uniformly for products and services I would never buy or use, got so annoying, I decided the $10 was worth it to avoid them.

thanks for new dn

fucking pop records

to balance my earlier gripes I want to note my discover weekly has been excellent lately

No idea why but the web player is back to it's old good self today.

Glenn, on the artists page, why do some acts have only 4 related artists and others 6 or 7? Seems totally random as some super obscure acts have 7 links, when mainstream acts have 4 and even similar acts (The Jam - 4:Paul Weller - 7) have this disparity.

hmm... I get 20 related artists for the Jam

I guess you mean the "overview" page?

Yeah, if I click on the related artists link then I get the full whack.

Just a layout thing: If the artist has a Latest Release, the Related Artists section expands to match the combined height of the Latest Release and Popular sections.

Oh yeah, obvious in hindsight. As a listening strategy I like to pick a couple of artists and try to get to them using only the relate artist link and found it frustrating that a lot only had 4 choices.

so after several weeks of my playlists not loading on the Roku App, Spotify "fixed" this by just removing playlists from the app altogether. What the hell is even the point anymore? Each new change has been a progressively worse product. I jumped into a premium subscription as soon as it was available and have been a power user since then, and it's been sad and frustrating to watch it slide downhill.

What the hell is even the point anymore? Each new change has been a progressively worse product.

see also: every computer program or app ever made, it seems

that may be true, but this seems like a particularly egregious case. When it was first released in the US, it worked like a dream. It seems that the changes they've put in place were designed specifically to undermine or remove all of the coolest features. I don't get why they'd do that, is there some kind of money to be saved?

wait is that for real? new versions of Spotify no longer have playlists? holy shit.

new version of the spotify roku app

*slowly puts down gun*

still that's shitty as hell

i'm still sore that they haven't restored good local files functionality to the program. my osx client spotify version is from 2014! that's the last time it worked the way i want it to.

Yes, the local files situation is pretty bad. Also pissed that the Android app removed Play All button from folders. It was the only way to group together playlists in cool configurations or get >10,000 tracks in a list.

new version of the spotify roku app

― Moodles, Tuesday, March 21, 2017 2:05 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the roku app has always sucked

this goes for most roku apps afaict

It's never been great, but I used it a lot. It's pretty much worthless without playlists.

Other roku apps I use, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO, YouTube, Twitch, all do pretty much what I'd expect them to. They certainly aren't hopelessly hosed.

Well, I tried to put Spotify on my Roku to see what you were talking about, but I can't even find it in the Channel Store...

update to spotify portion of sonos app seems to have made switching between family plan accounts easier :-)

xp

Which roku do you have?

https://channelstore.roku.com/details/19977/spotify

the roku playlists thread on the spotify community page has been very active, dozens of posts every day, lots of very pissed off people

Forget where the general streaming music thread is, but this story is of interest:

https://gizmodo.com/streaming-music-services-from-most-screwed-to-least-sc-1793612699

Oh no, Pono!

I'd love to see one ranking music services from most fucked up apps to most functional

Deezer is doomed for sure. I've actually got Deezer Premium which comes free with my landline, and as a streaming platform it's no worse than Spotify. The desktop client is better than Spotify's (although local music is still pretty shit), the mobile clients are well-designed and stable, the web player is good, the Flow suggestion-engine is pretty good too. It does the basics right.

Problem is, beside a shitload of Frenchies who get it rammed down their throat with their mobile/landline service, nobody else is on it so the whole social aspect and subscribing to cool curated/collaborative playlists is pretty much a no-go. At the first opportunity I'll drop it for Spotify Premium, and I'm pretty sure everyone else feels the same. Six million subscribers looks impressive, but if your business relies on bundling/force-feeding and nobody would otherwise consider the product, you're doomed, just as much as RealPlayer, Google+ and Hangouts.

I've worked on at least three of those services, two which are already kaput and pono, #1 most likely to die. (And a couple of others they don't mention. Rara for one)

Such things are hard. A lot of companies think they'd like to have their own offering, but getting a big enough foothold to make it pay is difficult, especially given the existence of Spotify.

I was there when they turned off the servers serving pono content. They were switching to 7 digital, I think. Shocked that the website is non functional 8 months later. Would kind of like a pono T-shirt though.

poor pono

is the function letting you share songs via a message in spotify gone? had a lot of long-running threads exchanging tunes with pals on there and can't seem to do it anymore. always seemed like the social elements of spotify were kind of buggy/always changing etc

it is curious how bad the social elements are. they are the market leaders and they cannot figure out how to make it easy for people to find their friends and share music with them, and don't appear to even want to. even though it would increase lock-in. increase playbacks. etc. just weird.

I usually share with sms, and it is easy

i envision a news-feed like thing with listening/charts, comments, collaborative playlists, etc. and last.fm has kinda fallen off a bit since the redesign, one would think they'd hop on that and co-opt most of those features especially as a lot of people migrate to streaming platforms