Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Self-hosted music streaming is the solution for your own library, you can forget about Spotify/Amazon/Apple Music ever doing that well. Plex (that's what I'm using), Emby, Subsonic, Ampache, Funkwhale, take your pick and don't look back.

Ugh. I can understand having a limit but why have it be so low?

xp the limit isn't for my own library of digital music. I don't own any digital music (technically, I spent maybe one hundred dollars on mp3s that are now lost forever). the limit applies to just saving the artist/song/album names to "your library" and not even downloading. It is absurd.

still a huge issue that i have no idea why they havent addressed

I can think of two reasons why they might do it: 1) to bound the amount of number crunching they need to do when finding your library's overlap with other users' libraries and 2) force you to prune your own data so they have a better idea of who you currently are and what you currently like.

but to be clear, it is still bad and dumb. so I am throwing a tantrum and leaving.

Amazon Prime Music seems to have reduced song/artist availability massively to push people into the additional subscription of Amazon Unlimited. Prime has around 2 million songs while unlimited seems to have more than 40 million.

yeah, I will likely end up paying for unlimited or apple music. saving $15/month would be nice, but I ultimately just want something to work.

Sorting Hat is down, anyone know if it’s a temporary break or something more permanent?

i've never heard of Sorting Hat, but Google led me to a new post from Glenn ,it seems? http://everynoise.com/spotify_new_releases.html

That makes sense, thanks for that. Impossible to listen to everything obviously, but handy resource to help spot stuff I’d otherwise miss.

The numbers in that post are nuts. Are more people making music or is this robot stuff? Both?

I’d assume that one important factor is that more and more music from more and more countries is being released/uploaded on Spotify. This has certainly been my experience with African pop music over the past few years - and there is still room for significant growth there. For instance, Tanzania, home to the leading musical scene in East Africa, is seriously underrepresented on Spotify compared to a country like Nigeria.

That as well eh. I need to check more of that. Cheers!

New releases is fun! It’s like going to the record store.

my desktop spotify is now doing this bizarre thing where if i search for something, the letters i'm typing type BACKWARDS into the search box. the letters literally go from right to left, as if i'm typing in arabic or something. so if i search for "Robyn" it types out "nyboR". i have restarted and it still does it! just astounding

If you C&P from a notes or text file, does it paste in correctly?

perhaps you'd enjoy Abba?

i've never heard of Sorting Hat, but Google led me to a new post from Glenn ,it seems? http://everynoise.com/spotify_new_releases.html

wow key thx for the heads up

Finding it a useful tool for listening to Podcasts recently. Also means i can listen to them on my phone while I'm out and about.
& now finally found my remote control for my dvd player so may go back to watching d/lded video files more.
So being able to listen to podcasts while mobile might be very useful.

So far so good on the Everynoise Sorting Hat replacement. I search for new American classical releases every week. Searching by genre is easier to do now.

why must we have to go through 100 steps to add local music to our phones (and then not be able to listen to it on a sonos speaker anyway)

has anyone cooked up a decent alternative method?

This version of "The Sun's Gone Dim and the Sky's Turned Black" from ahem "Cafe Mambo, Music for Dreams: The Sunset Sessions, Vol 1" is credited to Swedish pop star Johan Johansson instead of deceased composer Johann Johannsson. Easy mistake to make.

https://open.spotify.com/track/6XIHgwF5yfOSWI7rb1oS2l?si=HBDIwYd1RQi2_aPVm-3MJQ

excellent april fool's joke spotify

Does everyone get the same Discocover playlist?

i think so

how is last dance by donna summer a "disco cover" or "cover of disco"...am i forgetting something or did this joke playlist not go through a rigorous vetting process

Does everyone get the same Discocover playlist?

not this morning, maybe they're operating to strict US time zone april fools.

^Don't think I've got this (maybe I'm too late now?) but all tracks on Spotify were playing all distorted as if through a ring modulator until I restarted the app. Never have The Unthanks sounded so rad!

Discocover Weekly is personalized, but from a fairly small pool of joke-relevant tracks, so they won't vary nearly as much as regular DW...

ahhh i was wondering, thanks for clearing that up glenn

Maybe someone already posted this, but it's a FAST way to browse music on Spotify:

https://discoverquickly.com/

Where's this Discocover Weekly? All I'm being offered are endless playlists with different photos Billie Eilish looking extraordinarily gormless.

maybe because it's the 2nd in .au?

Seems to have disappeared from my app (USA).

Didn't see it yesterday either.

ya, I'm guessing they might not have rolled it out for the civilised timezones bcz that would have spoilered it for western hemisphereans

weird how in 2019 the only april fool's jokes I was aware of were actually good

Wish the recently played set up was better organised. IT's claiming I played things i just looked at then found out they weren'yt somethinG i wanted to listen to cos they were in the wrong language or whatever to the exclusion of things i actually have listened to.
Haven't played a made for me playlist yet so wonder how inaccurate something like that would be on that basis. If its mistabulating what I am listening to, like.

I've heard the custom playlist stuff doesn't factor songs you only play a little bit of. Anyhow the history function acts like how I'd expect... would be nice if it was longer eh. But you could always link up your account to last.fm... and exclude brief plays there

This was podcasts this morning. So things i'd gone to the page for and seen the language being used was french, Spanish or whatever so not actually played any of. Whereas some things i had played several episodes of hadn't shown up on the recently played page at all.

The Library size limit is pretty shit huh

yes

i just cant fathom why it hasnt been addressed yet

It feels like in general Spotify wants to discourage listening to albums instead of playlists.

perhaps they worry you may run out of discoverable things if you are able to remember that you previously discovered them

the whole discover weekly "algorithm" is making a playlist of shit you were forced to remove from your library

the album thing is weird. if you're listening to a song, navigating to the album it's on requires a trip to "..." and scrolling down which is juuust annoying enough to not do most of the time

you can just tap the song title and it will take you to the album

But then you risk what is probably single most annoying thing associated with streaming: accidentally playing a song when you didn't mean to. Wars have been started for less.