Spotify - anyone heard of it?

It keeps dumping my recent activity and recent searches recently. So I have to look things up instead of having the links already populated.
Or last week it had the images for links up but wouldn't connect with tehm and just gave me a message saying something went wrong.
What is up with this device

this is definitely a frustration with dance music, it is difficult to get it to recommend something outside of a closed loop of artists and tracks. Like if you've already dug a little bit, it isn't going to get you down any further.

wtf is this "my episodes" bullshit and why can i not just download a podcast without it becoming one of "my episodes" ??? they are two separate buttons!!!

I have to start and stop the app and or WiFi and of mobile data multiple times to open a single podcast episode every time

yeah, sometime in the last year it shifted into this thing where even opening the "downloads" tab, it's spinning around looking for signal/connection and i'm like, this is why i downloaded the goddamn podcasts in the first place.

I'd totally switch to using Spotify as my podcast app if there weren't free alternatives that are both more reliable and feature-rich. Surprises me that polishing up the app to best in class is considered a less effective way of getting market penetration than spending a fortune on sclusies.

I can't say I'm a fan of this new build at all. Where's the search bar? And why can't I drag and drop albums into a folder any more?

"mesh cinereaL" by autechre is missing the last 38 seconds on spotify. It's all there on Youtube Music, so this looks like an issue specific to Spotify. It's a couple of extra bleeps and bloops on a 24 minute track, but this is very important.

wait, are you saying they've tried to remove the search bar again? Which platform?

if you listen to 'Deceit' all the way through, spotify will say 'ALBUM RADIO BASED ON Deceit' at the top. feels like an admission of sorts.

Argh, this new version is barely usable. What is going on?

Which build are you talking about, on what platform?

spotifythread.biz

Just the latest update to my Mac. Not sure on the version. They've taken away the search bar at the top so now you have to click search. Editing playlists is all fiddly and unresponsive. And I can't seem to drag albums into folder playlists any more; instead I have to make a new playlist in the folder, title it, then drag it in

1.1.54 apparently.

I have the search bar and I can still drag albums into playlists. I'm on Mac 1.1.55.498.gf9a83c60 so maybe update?

ah i can see it says an update is available (thought i had just updated). damn, that means talking to a company admin

having seen the update but not downloaded, it looks terrible and appears to hamstring various usabilities, every change seems user hostile

I gave up struggling with the Windows desktop app about three months ago. It had become agonisingly slow, with 90% of searches searches taking over a minute, and sometimes up to 10 minutes. I tried switching off hardware acceleration, and I even - with great reluctance - switched off the ability to incorporate local files. Neither made the slightest difference. So I just use the web version within Chrome now; it has its downsides (no standardisation of volume betweeen tracks, no scrobbling etc), but it's better than the alternative.

I had something like that on the Windows desktop app a few months ago (but I think quite a bit more than three months ago), but now searches are fine. Might try a full remove and install, unless you already have done so?

it keeps popping up on my girlfriends computer but we did not add it and it is not in programs to get rid of so how do you delete it?

ok boomer

Holy shit. Spotify just invented radio. pic.twitter.com/qTReMyeY7J

— Thom Ashworth (@thomashworth) March 31, 2021

that is the standard snark, but it's more than that - it's IP-distributed & potentially interactive, with analytics and data that broadcast radio can only dream of

Is there a way to request Freebird through the app?

it's IP-distributed & potentially interactive

o shit Spotify just invented Shoutcast and love song dedications

look i'm not saying it's going to be any good. Apple had - and still has - all the pieces to do this right with Beats 1 integrating with their catalogue but they (imo) half-assed the execution, have barely marketed it, and don't appear to care much about changing that. turns out 1) radio is hard! 2) day-parting matters! 3) audiences can tell when content only exists to upsell you into different parts of a product

They added listening history (“recently played”)! That‘s been long desired, I think. Looks like it goes back to 2021-01-01

I joined Spotify in 2014 when they acquired The Echo Nest, where I was working. I was an Rdio user at the time, because The Echo Nest powered Rdio's recommendation and radio things. Most of what I liked better about Rdio was a) stuff we powered and thus would be responsible for making just as good on Spotify, b) white-background graphic-design stuff that was obviously never going to happen in black-background-committed Spotify, and c) Rdio things that only worked because Rdio never had more than a small and selective audience, like public comment threads on albums.

The one exception was Rdio's play-history feature, which was simple but great. It synched across clients, it showed you everything you had listened to by day, and it grouped the individual tracks by the context in which you listened to them. I've missed it for 7 years. Now Spotify finally has it, and it's just as great as I remember it. I didn't work on it, and the fact that it took 7 years to get it suggests that even my persistent personal lobbying for it over that period was not particularly instrumental, but whatever. Yay!

ha every now and then I remember Spotify tried to do light theme UI for a while

I've updated my iOS app but I'm not seeing any three-month history - just a recently played thing that I think was there before that lets me scroll through about 30 things.

Oh, ignore me – I've relaunched and now I see it.

imma still scrobble tho

Hmmm 🤔
https://open.spotify.com/track/5xPzqMr972jKwurq5CHZHz?si=kzkhEx1qTOqJb732PEN0Vg

that’s what you get for nicking the name of a French football club

not a bad amapiano track tho

Kids convinced me to get Spotify, so ... fine. Done. I've never used the service, though, and have a dumb question. If I'm looking for a boxed set or compilation, say something from Rhino or Soul Jazz, and I can't find that collection but I can find a playlist recreation of the collection, does that mean the "official" collection is not available?

Probably, yeah.

Yeah, that"s pretty common.

Kids convinced me to get Spotify, so ... fine. Done. I've never used the service, though, and have a dumb question. If I'm looking for a boxed set or compilation, say something from Rhino or Soul Jazz, and I can't find that collection but I can find a playlist recreation of the collection, does that mean the "official" collection is not available?

There's still a bunch of Soul Jazz comps that are on Spotify in an official capacity. Or at least they are in Canada. Just search up "Label: Soul Jazz" in the search function.

Ah! There they are.

Or, you know, a handful at least.

hey just an fyi for anyone who checks this for anecdotal evidence: this update is terrible and making me strongly consider switching to a new service.

Desktop or mobile?

forks what are your biggest discrepancies with it?

On Mac I briefly had the thing doglatin mentioned of the search bar disappearing without a trace. Some combination of hitting Cmd-L and restarting the app fixed it.

I like the way on desktop the library/playlists window keeps going blank and I have to scroll it up and down to make the text reappear, and the way search still fucks up and looks for the PREVIOUS thing you searched for even when you enter a new search term.

since getting a new laptop with an SSD all of Spotify’s performance issues have gone away for me

haven’t seen the new update yet tho

Yeah, the first thing Tsar Bombadil mentions is here as well (Windows 10 desktop). Adding a playlist, for example, makes the playlist blank instead of updating. I'd almost forgot, since it's easily workaroundable; apparently I now automatically do a little up-down scrollwheel wiggle after making a change. Still a bug that should by rights be a clear fix-now thing on pain of going somewhere else.