Spotify - anyone heard of it?

deezer is looking shaky these days business wise - not sure i'd invest personal admin time in their infrastructure

I may be mistaken but I'm getting the impression that apple music is fine now as long as you just forget about using itunes to try putting your own music into your phone? Keep it to streaming only and it'll work fine? Idk though - I've actively tried to avoid using apple music but I'm finding that they almost always have the new songs that I can't find in spotify or google play, so I'm currently debating whether or not they deserve a second chance.

siegbran: cheers for the deezer tip. i've just started the free trial (and am mindful of tracer's warning). clunky interface and terrible search, but the selection is good and the equaliser customisation is a nice surprise. i'll at least stick with it for the trial.

longneck: the putting-my-music-in-my-phone part is critical. if i sign back on with apple music now, whether i get to keep my music on there will depend on what mood icloud music library is in that day. google music seems to be the most solid and flexible of all of them, but no equaliser in ios is a deal breaker, and youtube red is still not available in australia (so i wouldn't be getting full value).

i cannot fathom why spotify limits offline music, unless it's got itself tied up in dumb contracts that specify that. really really stupid limitation. i wouldn't even be looking at alternatives if not for this.

I prefer Google Music myself and am not too bothered about the lack of equalizer (it would be great though). I'm also thinking that buying the individual songs lacking in google play though iTunes and uploading them to google play is probably cheaper than sticking w apple music, sigh. I've just now started to use spotify too and must confess that i like it a lot - it's pretty tidy whereas google play is an endearing mess. And their playlist function is obv the best. I just wish they'd have the extra songs that apple has and/or the upload function of google play. Sigh.

yeah, spotify's ui and playlists are lovely. gpm's ui felt fine when i was trialling it, probably just a bit vanilla if anything.

Integrating your own music library is pretty terrible everywhere, even with Apple who you'd think would be best placed to pull it off, with iTunes being a very powerful local library manager & all. Plex is pretty awesome for streaming your own stuff everywhere, but their sync-to-device is needlessly complex, unreliable and slow. But least there's steady improvement in the right direction there, all the other platforms (Apple, Deezer, Spotify, Groove, Google) are steadily pushing users further into their cloud. Reliable sync-over-WiFi of local music seems an afterthought to everyone.

tbh i'm not all that's fussed about seamless integration. i'd be happy to just stream (save) 98% of what i want to hear and have the other 2% sat on my phone and playable offline through a sound equaliser. gpm was pretty reliable in just letting me dump a load of albums in its cloud and download them to my phone (and keep them there without trying to change them or match them to anything).

spotify would let me upload some stuff but there's that save limit again.

*all that fussed

AA, are you trying to load your own local files or files from Spotify? They only cap you at 3333 for music that you do not own. You can put as many files from your own library as you wish.

Offline music on Apple Music has gotten a lot better, almost 100% happy with the service now.

What would you say is missing at this point, Jeff?

If you own a track and upload it to Apple Music where it's matched with their library, and you play it, does the artist / label get paid?

The matching is lacking, e.g. the wrong versions of songs being matched. But it's been lacking since iTunes match was released, so not sure when that will be fixed. I can live with it.

i definitely can't live with that. the only reason i want to upload my own music is to listen to that exact music, not a 7" single remix or a studio version or a clean version.

moodles: that's great, but the spotify cap still exists. so i'd have all the uploaded music i want to upload + 3,333 spotify tracks and i'd have to sign up to a second service anyway. (deezer' playback quality on ios has issues btw, so that's out.)

if spotify lifted its offline limit and/or apple music/icml ~worked~ i'd be sorted.

jeff how often do you use spotify to listen to music outside of the stuff you've "matched/synched"? most people just use it as a music library. it's really not ideally built for matching/synching/stuff, no matter what the developers tell you. it's like ordering a burger at Red Lobster or something

you know what i mean.. ordering something outside the establishment's specialty
not trying to sound condescending..

I really don't know since it is all combined, I can't remember what's mine and what's theirs. I mostly listen to giant randomized playlists, so the matching isn't as jarring because it's just another random song that comes up and not part of an album.

Really digging my DWP this week.

Even tunes I had designated as old warhorses and long ago tired of

Spotify buys 2 startups to boost music discovery and content experiences
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/01/20/spotify-buys-2-startups-to-boost-music-discovery-and-content-experiences/

Spotify has acquired two startups in a bid to boost its product and engineering chops. Dublin-based music discovery company Soundwave and the New York-based Cord Project are both joining the streaming giant.

You really require more than 3,300 songs to be available offline? That's ~20gb of music approximately or 330 albums at 10 tracks/album average. Seems...excessive?

but this board is not called "i don't mind music"

But what is a reasonable amount of music to rent for $10 per month?

you can rent as much as you like, it's what's storable offline that's the sticking point here. no competing service limits offline storage afaik.

the point of having a music library in your pocket (and the reason ipod classics existed) is to be able to listen to what you want to listen to, not to plan your day before you leave the house. the discogs of five of my favourite artists constitute about 25% of spotify's offline limit, not including a handful of updated playlists for ~discovery~ (which is at least half the point of having spotify).

Do you have a job/lifestyle that makes it difficult to stream music over wifi/cellular? I have very little of what I listen to saved locally but I have unlimited data so I don't feel restricted in what I have to listen to. The only time I ever sync music is when I'm flying.

only cellular data during the day. i do occasionally d/l some things i wasn't expecting to listen to, but ultimately i want to be able to store enough that i don't need a separate music database. apple music would be The Perfect Solution if it worked.

How much space do you have on your phone is a better question I suppose? Cheapest current iPhone ships with 16GB of space of which maybe half is usable. Costs exponentially more to add GBs (and then only up to 64...) I'm not saying the limit is annoying, I just think your use case is definitely an edge case.

that's not the point though. afaict no other major service imposes a limit on offline storage.

a 200 GB micro sd card is a hundred bucks these days.

apple music would be The Perfect Solution

What about a third party library eg mediamonkey? Can organise things on yr computer and transfer them to the phone to play through the apple music app, without signing up to apple music or suffering with itunes.

that's pretty much what i do now. it's fine but i'd really rather just use one app, especially to combine with newer stuff that i never bought/ripped.

there is basically the same issue with TV - there is not one single box (that i'm aware of) that gracefully allows me to stream OTT services, play local files, and tune in digital free-to-air broadcasts

Is Discover Weekly supposed to be tracks I've never played on Spotify? If so, it's broken.

No

Ok.

I can see it's sort of tailored to my listening (or at least my Spotify listening which is about 10% of it) but it's badly named if I'm supposed to discover something from hearing 'Release the Bats' or 'O Superman' for the thousandth time.

discover weekly SHOULD be tracks you have never listened to before, otherwise it's using a very columbusy interpretation of "discover"

could be that you are supposed to discover how good a song is and not just that the song exists

how would Spotify know what tracks you spent your pre-Spotify years listening to?

algorithms. extrapolation algorithms.

Spotify should really supply me with a playlist of original music that I'll love

maybe you are meant to discover something new about yourself

FYI according to a thing I read somewhere, it was originally meant to be purely new music but they found 30 tracks of novelty was too daunting, having a few familiar numbers in there made it a more attractive prospect.

Yeah, it's a mix. And yeah, we haven't tried to guess whether you're likely to have heard something out of (or before) Spotify.

I wasn't talking about pre-Spotify.

I don't mind a bunch of familiar songs (most of which are familiar from pre-Spotify) but I think a discovery list shouldn't include songs I stream regularly.

Has 'Notifications' been disabled? Have had nothing for ages (a couple of months at least).

I just got one. Sometimes you need to close and reopen though.

No, but we stopped triggering them when a track is added to a playlist you follow, which was the single biggest source (and the one most frequently ignored).

They're awesome for knowing when artists you follow add a new release, but I still usually don't ever seem them until I open the app fresh.