Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I have the same takes-forever start up experience running on Ubuntu.

Just checked on my MB Air. 10 seconds from clicking the icon to music playing.

Updated phone and Spotify won't read my SD card who do I kill

yeah the desktop version on my mac is so awful.

did you try reinstalling? find it unlikely that one of the world's most popular apps would be universally slow on a major OS

It's universally slow on ALL major OSes: the PC desktop version takes forever to get going properly, too

Nothing unlikely about world's most popular things being slow/stupid/inept tbh, it's the norm rather than the exception iirc. We put up with it, that's the real problem here.

Yes, I tried reinstalling -_- Tried everything. It's just so fucking slow (and indeed, on Windows as well).

My Windows 10 laptop often can't cope with Spotify auto-starting when powering up; it's already got quite enough to do. Disabling the auto-start and opening Spotify when things have settled down a bit helps. But yes, it's still slow to start.

I will never complain about spotify again
I will never complain about spotify again
I will never complain about spotify again

Pox on me: Last night, *while listening*, everything suddenly stopped: I'd been thrown out of my account. Someone broke in and changed the e-mail address, just like Niels experienced (up in this thread somewhere). Nothing but love for Spotify support for being on the case and swiftly giving me my account back. And most importantly, no playlists were deleted, and no Ed Sheeran was played in my brief absence.

the desktop experience in Spotify is lacking, but when I consider that the most viable alternative would require me to use iTunes, it's hard to complain too much.

I'm thinking about switching back to spotify from apple music, since I can get a student discount and pay $5/mo for spotify AND hulu. Any interesting new features from spotify? Is adding local music any less painful?

$5/mo for spotify AND hulu

Holy good deal, Batman!

so it seems like it won't let me sync my local files to my phone anymore. Is this an issue or is this simply not supported now?

also, a couple of annoying changes I noticed on the desktop app:

1. You no longer can import playlists.
2. No way to sort local files by date added.

I synced some local files to my phone last night with no problem at all. Importing playlists also still works for me, as long as it's MP3s in the playlists - I was flummoxed by this for a while recently, until I realised I was trying to synch WAVs.

I figured out the local file sync problem. Had to dig into the advanced settings on Windows Defender. I found that somehow there were inbound connection rules set that blocked spotify. Don't know how that happened, spotify was the only app that had a block rule on it.

it would be great if discover weekly had an 'i know this band already' option because i by no means *dislike* tom petty and the heartbreakers and lindsey buckingham, but i don't need to be made aware of their existence

agreed, that would be great

Ha, likewise wish I could tell Release Radar that, while I might love the music that a band made in their prime decades ago, I have no interest in their geriatric reunion album

This is the third week running where Release Radar has given me pretty much the same artists in pretty much the same order, just different tracks from the album. Also opens with Jimi Hendrix each week for mysterious reasons

Now that I've fixed the problem on my pc with the firewall blocking Spotify on my phone, it seems like local files and offline playlists are working a lot better than they had been before I had this issue.

xp hendrix, hmm. if it were full of phish and umphrey's mcgee, I'd guess that someone is jammin your release radar.

mine also starts with Hendrix

Mine starts with Hendrix too!

As does mine, Lover Man to be precise. On the upside new stuff from Janelle Monae, Aidan Moffatt, DJ Q, Alexis Taylor and Wye Oak. Amazingly something 'new' from Mel & Kim too,

When I type "future" into the search bar, the top suggestion is Future Islands, not Future, even though Future (obviously) gets way more streams (including by me specifically). What's up with that?

Spotify thinks that because I like Jonas Reinhardt, I will also like the Jonas Brothers.

As does mine, Lover Man to be precise.

same here

Oh yep, Lover Man it is for me too

Yes, this morning “Lover Man” replaced last week’s number one RR track by the same artist, “Hear My Train a Comin’”

how much did the Hendrix estate pay for this, I wonder

Apologies for noob question, but I thought the kind posters on here might be able to help me out. I have many playlists, including many fine ilx top 77 playlists etc. I want to shuffle all playlists (ie whole library). Is there a way of doing that?

It used to be seamlessly possible in earlier versions (although, having tried it a few times, I stopped doing it, as it didn't make for a very satisfying listening experience). You can still do it now, by creating a playlist folder, moving all playlists into it, then playing the folder on shuffle.

Thanks mike. I'm laboriously moving everything into an 'All playlist' folder, one by one (can't move in batch, it looks like). And then in that folder I can of course play each playlist individually, so it doesn't look like there's a downside?

It might be easier to just create a new playlist and copy and paste all tracks from all other playlists into that one playlist.

They took away the option of shuffling within folders.

I used to make loads of playlists and put them inside folders, and then shuffle the folder - but that’s kaput. Maybe you can still do that on desktop but I rarely listen to Spotify through my computer.

Also the only way you can move a whole playlist (as opposed to an album or song), is by copy/pasting via the desktop version. You can’t copy a full playlist into another playlist on the mobile app.

These are two sad facts that make my Spotify experience very irritating.

my two cents:
just cancelled my premium account and got back to flac'ing on soulseek. spotify was fun for a while, but i just ended up listening to lots of guilty pleasures and songs i'd long forgotten about because they were immediately available. then again, i have that at my disposable via youtube -- without paying ten pounds a month. disposable culture!
spotify's okay for radio.
curating a digital collection with it is useless. artists can remove access to songs at any time. i've just had whole albums disappear sometimes.

You can still shuffle within folders, but only from the desktop app. If you want to shuffle a folder on your phone you need to kick it off from the desktop app and then connect to your phone.

xp without paying ten pounds or any bills for anyone that makes something you love

Okay, I understand that many people don't get how seemingly non-random a truly random playlist can be, but right now it's very, very obvious that the shuffle function has adopted some element of adaptation, or "guided listening", or whatever. When I the first track I listen to on a 10,000 track playlist happens to be Matching Mole (or whatever) and 10 of the next 20 songs are also Matching Mole, it's obvious that shuffle is no longer random, or even close to it. I really like the idea of having an auto-generating "mood" playlist that uses a track that I choose as a seed, but more importantly I really, really value a genuinely RANDOM shuffle in order to explore the less-traveled corners of my library! How can we get a genuinely random shuffle again?

Looking into this a bit more, I think my first instinct to give Spotify the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was creating a "mood" playlist based on a "seed" track was too generous. Instead, shuffle seems to only function within a small number of tracks (can't be more than 50 or so) that surround a given track in the current sort order of the playlist.

So even if your playlist is 10,000 songs, it'll only "shuffle" within the 50 (or so) songs that surround (or maybe follow) the track that you started playing on the playlist. That is... very bad.

(this might be applicable only to when using Spotify Connect to play music on another device, but that doesn't make it any less of a problem, imo)

Having become familiar with Apple-style "take away the most useful features and claim no-one was using them anyway", I'm convinced that Spotify's next move is going to be to remove the ability to copy-paste text into the app to create a playlist.

fuck me, sorry folks I've been day drinking, that one's apparently been gone for years

Dan, it shouldn't do this. A couple things to check. Are you playing a playlist th at has local files thtat haven't been downloaded to your phone? Did you take some time for playlists to completely load on both computer and phone?

Kind of embarrassed after going on for 5 consecutive whinge posts above, but the phenomenon is real and seems to be the same thing that most of the people in this thread are talking about: https://community.spotify.com/t5/forums/v3_1/forumtopicpage/board-id/spotifyiOS/thread-id/30007/page/34

I don't download files to my phone (only stream), and I'm not sure about the playlist completely loading thing (how could I check that?). I've noticed it most recently while using an iphone to control tracks being played on either a PC or a chromecast using Spotify Connect. If I sort by Title (track title) before hitting shuffle, it becomes VERY obvious:

- Shuffle is on

- Start playing a track near the beginning of an almost 10,000 track long playlist (where all the track names start with numbers, since I've got the playlist sorted by track name) :
- the track I hit play on happens to be LCD Soundsystem - 45:33 Padded Cell Remix.

- Here are the next several tracks--keep in mind that shuffle is definitely turned ON at this point:
- Desmond Dekker - 007 Shanty Town
- Ghostface Killah - 260
- Harold Budd - Abandoned Cities
- Boards of Canada - 84 Pontiac Dream
- Hercules - 7Ways
- ABC - 4 Ever 2 Gether
- Barre Phillips - A-i-a
- The Maytals - 54-46 That's my number
- Harry Nilsson - 1941
- Amerie - 1thing

You get the idea. It seems to be shuffling ONLY among songs that are in the near proximity on the playlist to the first song that was played (in this case, those that start with numbers, or sometimes the letter 'A').

By completely loaded I mean, if you open the playlist and scroll to the bottom are all the tracks showing up or are ones toward the bottom coming up blank?

Also, does this happen when you hit the Shuffle Play button at the top of the playlist or only when you start with a specific song?

Thanks, here's what I've done:
- Open playlist, scroll aaaall the way to the bottom (this takes a while) to confirm that tracks all the way down to "Z" have indeed loaded.
- Hit the "Shuffle Play" button

- First track that plays is Nirvana - About a Girl. Next tracks are:
- Terry Riley - Across the lake of the ancient word
- T. Rex - 20th Century Boy
- Saint Etienne - Action
- Steve Reich - Act 1 - The casting out of ishmael and hagar
- Turzi - Acid Taste
- Steve Reich - Act 1 - Who is Abraham?
- Tracy Thorn - A-Z
- The Rolling Stones - 2000 Man
- Mission of Burma - Academy Fight Song
- Scuba - Action
- Steve Reich - Act 3 - Who is sarah?
- Souls of Mischief - 93 'til infinity
- Paul Hardcastle - 19

It's still stuck near the beginning of the playlist, where all the song titles begin with "A" or with numbers, and it's not even doing a great job of shuffling within that region (note 3 of the first 13 tracks are from the same Steve Reich album).

Very weird, I'm stumped

Turning off Spotify Connect fixes it, so I guess it's a Spotify Connect issue.