Spotify - anyone heard of it?

THey just updated the interface and dropped some features and apparently about 3 months of recent podcasts. So the most recent ones from several things i'm following are now fro february. Bah and indeed humbug.

Not seeing the recently played option or the list of previous searches. How awfully annoying.

I've noticed that on desktop you sometimes need to re-re-order by date to see the newer episodes of a podcast.

It updated the podcasts when I looked back at them. So must have just been redoing the visuals then adding in the links incrementally. Spotify has taken an age to up date daily podcasts recently. So have listened to things i wanted to hear over breakfast hours later.
Wonder if new interface will make that faster but seems like some features are currently missing.
I did find having access to a list of most recent searches by clicking blank in the search engine was really handy. Not seeing that at teh moment, so wonder if it will reappear in some form.

Looks like they have done away with the track popularity bar (on desktop) in favor of just presenting a track's play counts directly. (You used to have to hover over the popularity bar to see the play counts.)

I like this change because I keep a running playlist of new albums to listen to, and instead of dragging over an album's entire tracklist, I'll just drag over one track. And I generally like the use the most-popular track because that's usually the single and I can sample it on its own.

lol yeah i was complaining about that upthread. i'm cool with the playcounts being thee but slightly hidden, displaying them so prominently makes me feel like it'll contribute even more to the ongoing sports-ification of music

ILX's very own Adamrl once told me that Audioscrobbler brings together his four passions in life: music, the Internet, voyeurism, and meaningless statistics.
― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, August 10, 2005 12:14 PM (fifteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Motherfucker, now I have the new desktop version and lo, local files have fucked off into oblivion.

I've been using a desktop version from 2014 or so, I'm sure I'm missing out on a few features (can't play podcasts for one) but i like local files being functional and every update seemed to cause more aggravations. I think I was happier with the 2012 version tbh.

There's a switch for Local Files in Preferences...

not a fan of the artist name stacked under the song title. its the most important field and its like 3rd in the visual hierarchy now. and you have to click title 3-4 times to sort by artist name now...

Dang - https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/05/02/spotify-hits-a-billion-android-installations-doubling-in-just-two-years/

Does the Spotify API extend to letting people build their own front end? I'm assuming not, or we'd have seen it by now, but that'd be great – letting independent developers make nerdy-as-hell players where you can add whatever columns you like based on the the metadata, for example.

I'm surprised there isn't much. I like the Logitech Media Server plugin using librespot. I was looking the other day to see if someone had tried a proper desktop client

https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot

"ncspot" looks interesting :)

Desktop probably a lot to take on considering Spotify can moot your work at any time. There was more flexibility in prior API versions it sounds like. I wasn't using Spotify back then.

Found local files in the end, also found you can’t search them.

At least on the new Windows app, there's a magnifying glass on the far right side of each playlist including Local Files next to the Custom order drop-down.

Fucking hell

Glad to hear I'm not the only one finding aspects of the new design frustrating. I think I was using partial bugs as help aids. BUt still finding glitching wiping out what good they did all too often.
Like the fact that there were so many titles kept in recent search or if that even had an actual title. Like only found that stuff through a shortcut so not sure if it was officially recognised as part of the programme. I'm on Ubuntu so really don't know how intentional/ unintentional things like that are.
BUt could do with a similar cache. Not seen if there is a grouping of things like followed podcasts or what it would be under.

Just got the android update yesterday. Don't like the bubble menus at the top. Also, the new podcast main menu is weird. It doesn't matter how your sort it, they won't be in the order they were released. It just looks like a jumbled mess. But if you click on New Episodes, it takes you to what the old main menu looked like.

I know this isn't spotify specific but

WHY IS EVERY NEW RELEASE'S TRACKLIST IN ALL CAPS NOW

To be honest I'm surprised it didn't come sooner. The tyranny of prissy all lower case was bound to elicit a violent reaction sooner or later.

I’ve noticed (on other platforms) that artists frequently use all caps for their artist name; I assumed it was to stand out in playlists.

Typeface version of the Loudness war

it's enough of a trend that even the latest steven wilson album does this, presumably ironically/satirically

Opened my mobile app to find that Spotify has "upgraded" by library but taking what was once a logically ordered grouping of playlists and presenting them in a chaotic jumble. Honestly, algorithms are not always the answer!!

I wish you could turn podcasts off. I will never want to listen to a podcast on spotify. I never want to be notified or told about them or see their stupid cover art.

Hey, they're a podcast company now, even if you can't actually cast any of the programming to a pod. At least Rogan cracks out hours of material a week for the $100 million Spotify paid him on your behalf. Actual Prince cunting Harry and Meghan Markle got c. $50 million for theirs, farted out one 33-minute episode ("curated" from audio by a dozen other mostly multi-millionaires, despite being designed to “elevate underrepresented voices”), then sat back to lol @ the poors.

tho I suppose it took King-Emperor Ed 8 almost a decade after abdication to stop endorsing Hitler to win WWII and install him as president, give up on ruling the Bahamas, and just get on with attending Hollywood sex parties. They might drop some fire episodes in 2027, talking to polyamorous thought leaders.

bro you need to chill out and…

https://i.imgur.com/BrJymvB_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

the thing with podcasts is I always feel like it would be easier and faster to read a transcript than to listen to a chat, and I could listen to some music while doing so.

Podcasts are all about getting the dishes done.

I have a problem with reading so I enjoy getting information in through my ears. I'm very happy with my podcast app though. No doubt it's possible to set Spotify to download them rather than stream but I can't see any reason to change my setup. It's just nice to get out of Spotify, too.

o I enjoy getting information in through my ears.

Actually, I wish I hadn't accepted the idea that they are just alternative 'information delivery' systems. They're their own thing, not someone reading out an article, just as an article isn't a transcript of a podcast.

I wouldn't disagree with that either actually, reading a play isn't the same as seeing it performed either after all. I just think I prefer to read an interview than to hear/watch one.

I kind of like the new iOS and macOS apps. They seem more similar to each other now. I like the way in the iOS app, the library is now one big thing with content type as filter presets instead of tabs. I wish the searches would only search the selected content like they do in the macOS version. I also wish advanced search tags were available for contextual searching. Like to be able to search only songs in my playlists or liked songs for release year "1982" would be cool. While testing whether "advanced" search is still there, I searched the global search for "year:1980" and it tried to push Foo Fighters on me for some reason.

These apps are still a pretty bad experience over all. What I wish most is that I could hide podcasts.

That is also what I wish most. Podcasts are something from Moloch. Evil Sounds. Being reminded of their existence is the opposite of what I'm trying to do when I want to listen to music.

^^^ YES!

Also:
You want to move a playlist further up than the top of the tiny little window of playlists you can see there on the left? Thinking it might scroll up to assist you? NO! FUCK YOU!
Want to drag an album in one go to make a new playlist of it in one easy step the way you used to be able to? NO, GET FUCKED!
Giving in and dragging all the individual tracks into a new playlist but at least hoping it will include the artist name and not require you to manually type that in afterwards? HA HA, FUCK YOU, BUDDY!
Want it to show the playlist you've selected and not keep reverting inexplicably back to the Home screen? HO HO HO YOU PITIFUL FUCK, FUCK YOU!

Wish I could get paid to constantly make things worse and not suffer for it.

Ugh, if Spotify don't sort out their UI soon I'm gonna quit - I don't care how many playlists I lose.
Editing the order of a large playlist and dragging a title to another place seems to just randomly move a different tracks to another place.
Getting rid of the search bar at the top of the desktop app makes adding tunes extremely tedious.
And as we've said, adding an album to a folder is a task in itself.
Why did they think this was a good and helpful thing?

Agree on the whole, but as I ledge and I said before, the search box disappearing actually makes zero difference to how many clicks it is: before, you clicked in the bar to start typing. Now you click where it says Search and the box appears while immediately getting the focus. So it's functionally just the same, except that it has moved over to the left a bit. And as before, doing Cmd-L (or presumably Ctrl-L on a PC), is a quicker way if you're about to type anyway.

For all my dramatic moaning last night, I hadn’t noticed that—on mobile at least—there’s currently not any podcast stuff at all on my home page/tab. I wonder if they ID “podcast haters” or if it just organically pushed stuff I’d be more likely to listen to in there

It made me realize that I've always clicked/tapped away from Home straight away anyway, to search or 'your library'. I'm kind of blind to what Spotify tried to push on me on the home screen (yes, it would be nice to be able to set my library as the default first screen).

i thought this thread was getting a bit out there....... i just now got hit with the searchbar-less desktop. Good god.

it's so... large. At least Ctrl + and - still size it.

wow there is just no way to manage the 'library' of shit that gets added to your 'library' anytime you download something for a day. i figured it was just oversimplified on Android, but even on desktop, the only way to remove these things is to click into each individual title, uncheck the 'heart' icon, and click back out. not the least of the UI problems but jeeeeez. pretty sure selecting multiple things to do mass actions became standard in mouse-based environments circa, idk, 1992...

i forgot to mention: when you click back to the library, you're sent to the *top of the page*. so good fucking luck cleaning out the bottom dozens or hundreds of items.

I'm very happy with my podcast app though. No doubt it's possible to set Spotify to download them rather than stream but I can't see any reason to change my setup. It's just nice to get out of Spotify, too.

― Alba, Thursday, May 6, 2021 6:49 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This is where I'm at. Sometimes I think it would be easier to just listen to everything through Spotify instead of having a separate app for podcasts, but it's not like having two different apps is a huge nuisance. If the podcast app I use stopped working and I was in the market for a new one, then I'd probably just migrate to Spotify. As it is, I'm not really motivated to do so.

Oh yikes, I just got the update everyone was complaining about for weeks. I didn't realize they were basically turning the pc client into the www version of Spotify. I hate this. If I wanted to fumble with the www version, I'd fucking do that instead. Cool, great work, Spotify.

When looking at a single album page and you click "back" to go back to the full discography, Spotify now takes you back to the top (i.e. newest) part of the discography instead of the part of the discography you were looking at, which is a huge pain for artists with a large discography.

I noticed the alignment with the web version. I wondered if they might seek to phase out the desktop version - or make it 'Premium only' as Evernote have done?

I've not had any significant issues as yet but not played with it much.