Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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

If you're interested in the effect of streaming on the music industry, this is a much more informative document than a Dave Lowery rant on Twitter:

https://www.ifpi.org/downloads/GMR2019.pdf

Am i missing something about syncing up between 2 different devices apparently supposedly playing the same queued playing list.
Seems like half the time I put on my phone and its gone back to the queue from the last time I used it and sometimes it picks up the queue after the show its playing ends.
Also found it getting rid of the queue I had set up whej i swapped from phone to the desktop.

I've found that the queue can be dramatically different from device ti device. I've tried shuffling a large playlist on my phone, which works reasonably well. When I bump it over to the roku app the queue changes a lot because the roku app can only shuffle from a small portion of a playlist.

Wtf case study :
Add an album to your library
Playing album...oh I don’t like this song...tap the ellipsis
Uncheck “like” and be told the song has been removed from my library
Go back to album track list and it’s still there
???

works for me (desktop & android app)

Wtf case study :
Add an album to your library
Playing album...oh I don’t like this song...tap the ellipsis
Uncheck “like” and be told the song has been removed from my library
Go back to album track list and it’s still there
???

― calstars, Friday, April 5, 2019 6:04 AM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yeah, this happens now too, it sucks complete ass

apple will make a commercial with "limit to your love" playing where person touches the little spotify heart on a track and is told about the 10k limit.

I've been using Spotify for nearly a decade and I still don't really know what "Your Music" is. Is this the stuff you've downloaded for offline listening, or just some list of favorites? Do people listen to these huge lists on shuffle or something?

It is the lists of artists, albums, and songs you like. The songs list is long and useless. The other two are nice to have.

My workflow is: I hear a song, add it to my library/save it/like it/star it/whatever it is this week, then every so often I go through the what I've added and put them in suitable playlists. I never listen to the whole lot on shuffle.

I see. It's the that list of stuff I've accidentally + on

clicked

Alba flow is otm

I stay away from the 'add to your library' functionality - be it star, heart, add to saved tracks etc - precisely because I can't work out what goes where and it seems to change all the time anyway. I just playlists, which work just fine for me.

my approach is an evolving mess.

I did notice something recently on desktop that I'd like to see on mobile... an option in the saved Albums view to only show albums I've saved (and/or downloaded?) in full. I don't "save" any songs aside from albums because it makes the "album" view useless. For tracks, I'll throw them on a playlist instead.

I'm tripping over myself now because I have some songs from saved albums on playlists that I have downloaded, making the album show up on my album view when I am in offline mode

I know that if anyone would understand, it'd be y'all

I'm sure this isn't an entirely new thing but it feels like it: using apps is a lot like watching modern telly programmes in that you have to surrender to them basically making shit up in front of you. Which makes me sound really old but there it is.

Fwiw, ethical implications aside, I'm still very much in the Spotify has been a total fucking revelation camp.