Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I assume "a few refunds" is trivial in general for most companies

imagine asking for a refund for that.

was more annoyed by spotify's promotion of its own voice control technology

I hope this isn’t coming out of your bonus Glenn

surely glenn has come up with a more interesting name for that pay genre

Every time somebody hits Next on a Drake song before the end, I get $.0001 for each second remaining. People laughed at me when I originally made this deal. "Who are 'Drake' and why would people need to skip them?"

good analysis imo at the FT here (t.co link to get past the paywall, but google "Spotify: Drake-oil salesmen" if the link doesn't work

https://t.co/5PvVMWlO8E

The rogue KING has another new track out.

I laughed when this showed up as "Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark" on my release radar tho:
https://open.spotify.com/track/3EJfmzhb9CNJT43ZGOP88U?si=LNlogGsdS0S-NdOte6Cd4Q

Got both of those too - also a Squeeze that Spotify thinks is that Squeeze but isn't. This is definitely happening more often lately.

I got that "OMD" track too. Guessing those aren't guest bars.

Someone should rap over OMD's 'Sacred Heart' though.

Maddeningly, when I save a playlist on my iPad, it saves as ARTIST - ALBUM, but when I do it on the desktop app it saves as ALBUM - ARTIST

Maddeningly, when I save a playlist on my iPad, it saves as ARTIST - ALBUM, but when I do it on the desktop app it saves as ALBUM - ARTIST

This desktop behaviour appears to be a recent change -- I have an old playlist folder to which I drag albums as playlists on my desktop, and all previous entries are ARTIST – ALBUM, but suddenly now, newly dragged albums are named ALBUM – ARTIST. Grr.

hey uh pretty sure that new Fucked Up song is...a different Fucked Up

i’ve been reporting these mixups when they show up in release radar by clicking the three dots on the right hand side

ah!

Spotify just reminded me it’s fhe weekend and that it’s time to lay back and relax and maybe chill to some jams
No shit bra?

A few weeks ago it offered up a playlist — “Songs to Test Headphones With” (192,347 Followers)

The summer rewind playlist I got this year is really good!

I've seen “Songs to Test Headphones With” before--seems to be mostly "dads who are really into music" stuff iirc? Steely Dan, Roxy Music, etc

Hey, but after checking it out I see that now Spotify has the real recording of Axel F! I think it was some fake 3rd party recreation before...

Glad to see 'Songs to Test Headphones With' includes Happiness Is Easy by Talk Talk, that song was always my go-to for that back in the Discman era.

probably my single biggest gripe about the mobile app is that when it decides you're offline -- which has little or nothing to do with whether you're actually online -- the app is unusable until it decides you're online again, which can take ages

Oh yes, that is bad. It's about my only gripe really, apart from the startup time.

I don't get that - you have premium, right? When it thinks I'm offline it still lets me play tracks I've downloaded.

Smae here

..."downloaded"?

Yeah, I have premium. I'm not talking about tracks I've downloaded but about ones I want to stream.

Which is mostly the way I listen, given that I have unlimited data but only 64GB on my phone.

I get this too: I'm sea Ching and playing from the whole catalogue; my connection drops for whatever reason so the app goes into offline mode; in offline mode I can still search whatever tracks I have downloaded (stuff on my SD card, for instance); my connection is restored, but it takes ages (sometimes not until I've crashed and reopened) to recognise I'm back in online mode and want to search the whole catalogue. It's maddening.

*searching,ffs.

I do have premium but when I use mobile Spotify it's to stream (if a track's downloaded it's probably on my phone anyway)

The app is bad both ways: if you’re online and then lose connection, it will try for ages to load a playlist even if it has it locally. Infuriating behaviour on the Tube. You can fix it by switching to offline mode but they hide that

yes, the "thinks you're offline" problem is the worst. the solution, which seems to be downloading stuff you really want to listen to reliably, also sucks because you end up filling up space to the point where the app needs to be deleted and re-downloaded to ever function properly again.

these two pretty big problems make it extra annoying when the app tries to sell you on using the new voice control feature you will never use and they wasted time on. squashing bugs doesn't dazzle investors, though.

Spotify would probably say "Tube use-case problems" are a tiny percentage of users and not worth dealing with.

Right, tho otoh metro commuting is prime listening hours. And it's make or break stuff: if a service doesn't work on someone's commute and a competitor's does, it doesn't matter how rock solid they are elsewhere.

(And fixing it for the specific case has general benefits for everyone. Mobile connections aren't reliable is true as ever)

i agree with everything you're saying

I was happy to see the app shrink in size when I “undownloaded” almost all of my library. Originally the app was 2.1 gigs and it shrank to about 1.6 or so. Better than nothing

There's a new 'delete cache' option in the latest version, but it, uh, doesn't seem to do anything - sizewise, at least. I'm resigned to the 'nuke from space' option once a month or so.

just checking that y'all don't have "offline mode" checked in preferences?

I stream from the desktop client when I'm at home but I never stream on mobile. Basically the mobile app is my main offline music player. With a 128GB SD card there is very little to worry about w/r/t storage space.

that option is available to me. you have premium, right?

I finally figured it out. Should have checked this thread a month ago.

Feel like I've complained about this recently, but for me the biggest mark against Spotify is the lack of search options. I used to be able to search for genre (which wasn't really all that useful given the often weird genre names), genre AND year, or by label, but the Mac desktop app doesn't appear to respect any of those anymore. I just did a search for a label and got nothing but a handful of playlists. Same thing for "Year:2017". It returned two songs, both with the word "year" and "2017" in the title. I guess they want us to use 3rd party apps to sift through their catalog. Maybe forcing the obsessive minority to jump through hoops puts less of a burden on their database servers or something.

That sucks. Was working until recently.

OK.. I do have to say, though, that right after I posted that I started searching around for 3rd party apps that would help me put some new playlists together, and found this, and now I'm not getting any work done at all. I still don't see a way with this tool to cross reference genre, label, and year. I'd like to do something like: Generate a playlist of everything released on four labels between '86 and 94.

that looks p damn cool

FWIW, the genre/label/year searching still works in the web UI, and hopefully will return to the other apps before long...

Phew! Seems like those queries can't possibly be as expensive as "make me a playlist of similar music to this other arbitrary playlist."

does anyone know how to get playlists to show album titles in addition to song titles and artists?

oh nm i see i just needed to expand the window

hey uh pretty sure that new Fucked Up song is...a different Fucked Up

― Simon H., Friday, July 13, 2018 3:47 PM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i’ve been reporting these mixups when they show up in release radar by clicking the three dots on the right hand side

― maura, Friday, July 13, 2018 3:57 PM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How does this work? Using the OS X app, I see an option to "Suggest an Edit," which takes me to the Spotify Line-In web form, but I don't see a good way there to report a credits problem when two artists have the same name.

My last two Release Radar playlists have included new tracks by Spirit, but this Spirit is a contemporary act, not relevant to my listening history, whose discography has been garbled with that of the 1960s Spirit.

I'm still wondering how to report same-name artists with garbled discographies.

This week's Release Radar included a brand-new Spanish-language single from T. Rex.