Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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.

Accidentally playing a song when you didn't mean to is a tautology for the ages. Also: new board description.

start the mistaken song again once or twice, it will sound like you're "jamming"

you are all otm imo

I wish I could umm.. sort my album list randomly.

Still want to be able to shuffle play a folder of playlists...

Windows desktop version 1.1.3.259: Wait, what?

It seems the search bar has been removed from the window in general, and I have to select "Search" at the top of the left sidebar, to get a search bar – as soon as I click on a song, album, artist etc, the subsequent page is without search bar! Is this really intentional?

This makes playlist work a horrible experience: Say I want to add a few unrelated tracks to an existing playlist far down in my left-sidebar playlist tree. Okay, I go to "Search", search for the first one, find it, click on song/album link, scroll down in the sidebar to the correct playlist, drag the track over. I can handle that. BUT, then to search for the next one, I must either scroll the sidebar back to the top to click "Search" again, or use the back-button -- but the back-button ALSO scrolls the sidebar back to the top (!!!), so that I must repeat the scrolling down once for the next song as well!

Surely the search bar should always be easily accessible?! Or am I missing some simple workaround?

The search shortcut Ctrl+L works, but also idiotically scrolls the sidebar back up so it can visibly highlight the "Search" choice. Can this nonsense have been internally tested for even half an hour before being rolled out?

it's good to see a version number posted. I checked and I'm running the same. Haven't noticed much recent change at all. Rarely do. Search bar stays, no matter how small I make the Spotify window.

Am I just lucky? It's strange how the client seems to constantly break for a lot of people. I seldom update (manually) on Android, because of the complaints I see online.

Am in Canada for what it's worth

Interesting! Let me double-check the version number... the entire thing is 1.1.3.259.g8172f63a

You could drag your playlist to the top of your list to avoid the scrolling to search issue - something I always do when building playlists on desktop.

It’s not an issue, it’s a feature

I’m still trying to pin down what’s so horrible about the new ui on iOS, mainly because it’s so baffling that I am never sure I’m able to do what I’m trying to do until after something unexpected happens and then I go digging in menus
Maybe one thing is that they’ve conflated saving music with liking music when they should be the same thing? Who knows. I guess my expectations should be lower. And they’ve succeeded in making me realize that

bringing the heart thing in after removing stars years ago is kind of a weird move but im into it anyway.

My search bar is always present, too.

haha imagine investing £10+/month into a virtual music collection stored in the digital ether within a shitty UI that's constantly getting fucked with by a company that doesn't pay independent artists fairly while limiting your own music collection to 10k songs and turning music into wallpaper via bland vanilla playlists

I haven't come up on this limit. these things are best used as a supplement to your own collection, even if that collection is just a bunch of files that you play with another player that isn't made to be online all the time.

within a shitty UI that's constantly getting fucked with by a company that doesn't pay independent artists fairly

nothing like itunes/apple then.

I ran out of energy for updating my own collection years ago (arguably this is my problem but all UIs are in principle always shitty and way more trouble than sticking a cd on a shelf and dealing with two different digital music UIs is too much).

I sympathize a lot with everyone here

I'm currently maintaining my digital collection with Logitech Media Server, so.. keep me in your prayers as well please

nothing like itunes/apple then.

To be fair, iTunes itself is a very powerful (even scriptable) library manager with a great UI. But payments to the artists are similarly poor of course.

itunes was becoming bloatware before I quit it, has it improved?

i use Dopamine on windows, switched recently from foobar2000. both totally faultless, FLAC compatible. dunno about mac.

Depends what you define as 'bloatware' - iTunes has a lot of powerful functionality but if you don't need the library management aspect of it (scripts/filtering) or the features like remote control, then there's lighter music players around sure.

I've tried MusicBee of late and it's a great little tool. Trouble is, I'm still uploading to Google Play Music (probably futilely) and the easiest way to manage that is through iTunes, so I'm still attached to the bloody thing, like it or not.

Is Dopamine better than MusicBee, anyone know?

haven't tried Dopamine but really liked Musicbee the while I used it. I switched to foobar from there for whatever reason, but the amount of tinkering around with it to get it up to the level of library management that Musicbee does "out of the box" is just nuts. Also had the impression foobar sounded better... not sure how that works exactly!

nothing like itunes/apple then.

good burn if meaulnes had said anything about itunes or apple

spotify app has become 100 percent useless for its primary function for me (commute listening) as i can no longer access my saved albums if there’s no internet connection to tap into. not sure when this happened but i remember a not-too-distant past when i didn’t have this problem

the ui does get worse and worse. sweet recent font change though

Is there a reason you don't save the stuff you want to listen to offline?

That's weird. You've downloaded the albums, not just saved them, right?

xpost

that is the germane question

but when you step back and look at it from a non-nerd perspective it sounds inane!

Thread by David Lowery:

Try living on $0.0038 a stream and then get back to me. https://t.co/bUVtICBfQ1

— David C Lowery (@davidclowery) April 4, 2019

Yes, saved is stupid Spotify terminology to anyone who has old-fashioned pre-cloud ideas of what saving means, it's true.

That sounds like I'm being sarcastic. I genuinely think it's stupid!

"ahh you've saved it, you see, but it's not actually on your phone"

whaaa

You can still listen to downloaded stuff offline iirc

yes but not "saved" stuff, which is a distinction that i have to say strikes me as fairly counterintuitive

i can *listen* to downloaded stuff offline, but i can't access the album pages offline, so if i want to, say, switch from one album to another while i'm in between stations on the train, i ... can't

and i'm pretty sure i used to be able to

and these would all be saved, downloaded albums, i don't fuck around

yeah, I can still see "Your Library"->"Albums" while offline

if that's what's meant by "the album pages"

is this even with Settings > Offline mode ticked on? I use this loads cuz I have 1gb mobile data... even the app phoning home about my activity with offline tracks is a bit much

if so, delete app and start again, I'd say. I got to clean house on this thing once in a while. Android that is. Windows and Linux have given me no issues