Spotify - anyone heard of it?

For some reason my ipad won't update its OS for the last several versions, which has the happy advantage of meaning my iteration of Spotify on there is old and working beautifully

this is more a streaming services in general, and I am very prepared for the answer to this to be no, but are there any APIs that allow data to be accessed about the features of the music itself (beat detection, structure, etc.), and not the metadata?

djay's Spotify integration seems to have some of that sort of thing happening, but I can't really tell what's Spotify metadata and what djay itself might be doing (either on my computer or their server)

If I’m not mistaken djay stores that metadata locally and/or on yr personal iCloud, it doesnt sync it back to Spotify for others to use, which makes sense as you can modify the bpm detection/key/etc yourself.

fwiw I am about 10 years of coding ability away from doing anything with this but the stuff I am tossing around wouldn't require anything to be synced back

right right. Is there even another streaming service that has an integration like this available? Might be the closest thing for whatever Katherine's looking to do

Spotify used to have a more open API with all sorts of little third party apps, before I ever used it.

the other solution is to let people work off files on their hard drive, like audiosurf does, but I don't think people... store music that way often anymore, certainly not as often as when it was released

oo making a music game? They're still a thing aren't they? People into those still have a bit of an MP3 collection, I'd think!

maybe in 2008 but things have changed colossally in the past decade in terms of relying on streaming, particularly for newer music

I think some link up with services that provide free-use music? Been a while since I looked at any of these

some yeah, but the ideas I am tossing around rely on songs people know and have pre-existing attachments to (otherwise I'd just hire a composer)

sounds like $$$

the eternal reality check

Spotify seems to support some kind of API for musical information: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/tracks/get-audio-analysis/

The free Serato Pyro app still beat-mixes from Spotify with astonishing precision.

Lots of audio information available from the Spotify API...

Just been recommended Lulu's new one. ("To Sir With Love" is a favourite of mine). It's called "Some Mutherfuckers". Thanks, Spotify

Thought it was called “Melancholy.”

I like to "DJ" using the queue, and it would be easier for me if there were an option for moving a track to the top of the queue, like many music players have. Sometimes I have a queue that is fifty tracks long, and it's a pain to drag the track all the way to the top. Or is there an easier way of doing this that I'm not aware of?

I've tried moving podcasts up the queue on my phone and its not worked. Is there an easy way to do that. Can't left click or right click as far as I can see so don't have much nuance in highlighting.
Can you move them up and down queue on a mobile anyway.
JUst tends to jump onto the podcast I'm trying to shift and ditch the others taht are between the previously playing one and the one I'm trying to line up next where I'd like them to just play after teh one I'm trying to move.

It's very annoying that after 15 years of smartphone (and desktop) apps there's a pretty good template by now how to implement features and UI design in a music player (queue and playlist management, navigation by artist/album/genre, shuffle, etc) but every new developer tends to ignore all of that, goes for the awesome impractical crazy unique radical design thing, only to slowly revert to what everybody else does because it works.

I don't think the music-playing universe now is the same as the one 15 years ago, so I don't resent experimentation. (Also: I don't work on the UI at Spotify.)

https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/spotify-determines-that-it-overpaid-publishers-in-2018-requests-refund-1203250260/

The “appears on” list is now so short that I can’t even get a full list of appearances on 2019 Riddims for most dancehall artists. It’s totally ridiculous. Please help, Glenn!

Sorry, longneck, not totally sure what you're looking at. More details?

Dancehall artists typically appear on at least a dozen riddims in the course of a year. These songs are not necessarily singles, and they won’t show up under “albums”, as the album belongs to the producer. But as you might not know who produced a ridding, you’re likely to go to “appears on” in the iPhone app to find the riddims an artist has appeared on. But if I go to, say, Vybz Kartel to look for the riddims he has appeared on, I’m only shown 25 titles and most of these are recent compilations. The 25th and oldest “appears on” entry was added as recently as 15 May, meaning that anything Vybz Kartel appeared on previously to 15 May is simply not there. This makes keeping track of an artists work pretty difficult.

I assume you're looking on a phone, where it's true that we only show the first 25. If you look on the desktop version you can see the whole (very long) Vybz Kartel list...

So they got rid of starred tracks … then added Liked Tracks … which instead of including my years of starred tracks, includes every track from every album I have saved?

yeah real confused by this

xxpost Yeah, I mainly listen on my phone...

Although in good news, they've finally made it so you can save an album without saving every track in the album! Hurrah!

this garbage program now has so much bloatware and pointless code tacked onto it that it no longer runs on my Macbook Pro, it takes somewhere between "5 minutes" and "never" to do anything like search an artist, switch playlists, or click on an album. gonna be cancelling my paid sub after maybe 3 years because no, I am not buying a new fucking computer when I can stream Netflix as well or better than I could 3 years ago.

IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT

Spotify Version 1.1.10.540.gfcf0430f

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012)
2.5 GHz Intel Core i5
4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

(I needed to hear a few Mekons songs I didn't know, I went to Youtube instead)

"You have forced Spotify to quit. Send a report to Apple"

i was able to roll back to an old version after they removed the search bar (lol thx dudes), iirc i just googled for it and found a page with a bunch of diff revisions & was back in business. you might need to change some permissions so it doesn't auto-update but it'll work fine.

it is definitely bloating to unpleasant proportions

I'm running the same version on a late 2013 2.4GHz Intel Core i5 and I have to say it's … completely fine, when God knows many things on this MacBook are really not any more. I do have 8GB of RAM so I guess that could be the difference but really, Chrome quite regularly seizes up on this machine (and the other day, Notes!) so I wonder if not about bloat and more something specific that gets fucked up with the installation or preferences on some machines.

I use the browser version, no bloat (and no ads!)

On my 2013 iMac at work the application is useless, freezes all the time, doesn't do searches or anything really, same as Sleeve. Can only use the webplayer.

The browser version has lower sound quality, though, no?

The app experience on my Windows PC is pretty dreadful, it drags and noticeably slows down after running for more than 15 minutes, and sometimes even freezes the whole fucking computer. The Android version was fine until fairly recently but lately it's been crashing a lot and I get the 'offline mode' error when I'm not. I'm thinking of cancelling my subscription as well, there's no point in paying for something that makes me want to pull my hair out in frustration.

Not sure about the lower quality, I wouldn't notice that cause of the in-built imac speakers not being great obv. But yeah, it's frustrating as hell that the app is woeful.

Premium user here, using the Android app. I used to be able to download a whole album and then remove certain tracks from it. So if I downloaded a whole reissued album including bonus tracks, for example, I could remove those bonus tracks from the download which I didn't want, in order to save space. But now it seems to have changed so that it's all or nothing. Every track has the little green downward arrow next to it, indicating that it's been downloaded, but if I tap the three dots menu next to an individual track there is no option to remove that track, as there used to be. I can remove the whole album download and that's it. Am I missing something?

Can you make a playlist of just the tracks you want and download THAT instead? Works for me.

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/spotify-book-authors-interview-daniel-ek-steve-jobs-1203277715/

I'm always a little disappointed when I open this thread and people are complaining about functionality rather than their effect on music /the music industry.

After reading all of these complaints about the various Spotify interfaces, I'm forced to wonder: Anybody else using Daphile's "Spotty" plug-in? It's not perfect, but it's all business compared to the app and browser versions.

Daphile is a bit of a pain to massage into compliance, but once it works . . .

And, Jordan, I buy expensive vinyl and cheap CD box sets. So fuck off.

Hey I use it too, I'm as guilty as anybody.

I use Spotty on Logitech Media Server... in addition to desktop and Android Spotify, which I've been lucky enough with. This is the first I'm hearing of "daphile".. what's the advantage over LMS?

There are plenty of discussions on ilx about the state of the business/streaming. Do we need one specific to Spotify in that regard?