Spotify - anyone heard of it?

It can be equally annoying if an album is ONLY available in a deluxe 72 track version

I've had an update today - desktop & web player - with a total redesign of how the Your Library section functions. Essentially, all the functionality of the library is now managed in an expanded/expandable left-hand column, with buttons across the top for Playlists, Albums, Artists & Podcasts (FFS). Each element of the library opens within that left-hand column; there's also a 'search library' function, separate from the usual Search function, that works within the left column, too. You can organise by recent/recently added/alphabetical/creator. There's a fair amount of autonomy with real estate, as in you can stretch the library as far as you might want to.

Individual albums/playlists then open in the right-hand column. Home and Search buttons are in the left column but once clicked functionality is managed in the right-hand column.

I don't hate it actually.

Brought to you by a very bored and boring man.

It looks nice but I'm so used to the tree view (which is still on the web player for now) now I'm finding it takes more clicks to navigate to playlists and end up typing to get to some. Poor response times also.

The arrows still open folders in the tree view...

^ took me a while to realise that admittedly (because clicking on the rest of the playlist 'button' opens the contents like a new page if it's a folder. To be a little more constructive, I guess it's just not being able to see as many playlists at once in that view now irking me but I'd be cooler with it if instead of showing the playlist creator's username with very playlist (not useful if most of the playlists are your own) it showed the number of tracks in it (again just personal preference but I'd love this).

Could you maybe have stuff in your queue?

― glenn mcdonald, Saturday, March 4, 2023 8:19 AM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Since this post, I have caught myself accidentally putting stuff in my queue from time to time. Thanks for the troubleshooting, glenn.

Just fat fingers, I guess.

New menu is a bit hair triggered. I just tried clicking on a space within the designation to find taht it started playing instead of what I was trying to listen to. I had just been trying to see if a show on my library list had any new episodes that I wasn't aware of.
Haven't liked the interface being very iffy about picking up a track/episode and shift it up the playlist queue for a while. Either doesn't pick up or may start playing and feels like the process is only minutely different. Also trying to pick up a specific track and finding it crosses a highlighted one to be replaced, or just gets left behind without you knowing. Is there a feel I'm just not getting so far, like trying to avoid one thing you wind up doping another. Ho hum. & if it's anything it's level of pressure of touch which doesn't seem to be a constant.

I find this interface really dodgy.
I thought you could click on the icon or below where the text was and just wound up with the show starting. So not sure how you get this menu thing to work if you're only seeing thumbnail for whole show as in not episode specific.
Again was trying to avoid things that worked negatively before.
& did think these menu items were there to allow further investigation not just as play right now. Like trying to work out what to cue vs arbitrarily going for anything within the designation. JUst seems a bit full blown wrong really

I'm not really following you, sorry. Which "menu" are you discussing, and what do you mean by "the designation"?

haven't tooled with desktop a lot since this change but I'm surprised they saw fit to make it this complex

New set up has what was a different page called Library incorporated into teh left hand column of the main page menu.
I think people had been talking about taht over teh last few days.
I'm not getting all updates of new episodes so thought I would check the titles/thumbnails of the shows and instead of being able to look at theings at teh same time as listening to the show or track I was playing it just switched the audio onto an episode of the show. Not sure if tehy were even current episode and thumbnail should take you to a place where you could choose the episode you listened to since the library page had that option.
So again, hating the interface. THought it looked ok when I first saw it but seems to be pretty flawed .

a thing i was curious about is whether the recent big jumps in large language model power can be used to radically optimise recommendations. it feels somewhat uh instinctively (i'm not a data scientist) like they should, given the large amount of a) structured data and b) user insight spotify has. apologies doing a shameless 'hi glenn i has a question' post. a friend of mine was moaning about spotify recommendations saying 'last.fm was better' - that hasn't been my experience particularly - 'ze algorithms' will often surface something that counts as a proper 'discovery' for me and this particular gripe felt more like 'person moans about thing not being like another thing' but it did generate this question!

I've enjoyed getting recomendations from teh program but since they keep changing everything around continually the space taht used to have the recommendations on disappears for months. I see it has returned recently but i think it is so far repeating things i already know. Have been surprised in teh past. Which actually surprises me since I am already aware of a large amount of music.

actually that’s a good point: discover weekly used to be generally v good for me. i just went hunting for it, and it’s completely off beam now. though that may be because i’m listening to a lot more cds and bandcamp these days, and spotify has become more of an erratic “ok let’s see” place.

Is the interface in Spotify still being semi randomly updated to check out what individual designers want to have a go at as it has seemed fro teh last couple of years or is there a more organised process by which things are being done.
& is everybody else having teh same experience with thumbnails not leading to menus but starting new tracks/shows playing.

Again I tried to get to a menu for a show that should have had a new episode today and tried to click on an area of the box designation for the thumbnail plus details that had worked before to get to menu to have the audio flicked over to a semi random episode. New episode hadn't come in yet anyway. So is that happening to everybody else too or is it a fault in the set up I'm using. & not sure how I'd break taht down further, Ubuntu through a computer that's a few years old or whatever. Would hope that an interface that worked on several layers of menus wouldn't arbitrarily bypass them. Would think that would be recognised to be a design flaw.

I had actually fgully extended the library section of the menu to try to avoid hitting a point that might trigger the switch.
Also the designated list area for each thumbnail/show changes due to amount of text in it which can be down to length of show name or something as simple as that. It looks like somebody took what worked on a separate page and just moved it so that it formed a column without taking into account functionality. Or that's the way it seems to be working here.

So I guess poor old Marti Caine's artist page has somehow got hijacked

https://i.imgur.com/SpLSU8m.png

Well, I got the new update and it sucks shit.

Why are my saved albums all in one column down the left? I have hundreds! I know most people on Spotify save individual songs and not whole albums but this is ridiculous.

lol does spotify have a bunch of designer-developers that get fired if they're not making changes every two months? They keep making changes that rarely make any sense. If it ain't broke leave it be.

Have they binned the TikTok style home feed then?

Mine's back to the old one after this most recent update

glad to see I'm not the only one finding these things to be a pain.
THought frequency was possibly higher than every couple of months with continual change. & I would think that motivation would be similar to my take on it. What is making things change, fire everything at teh wall and see if it sticks. Continual Beta with no user feedback or control. & several negative points repeated several times.

The left hand menu thing is bad enough with 20 odd podcasts as the content. Can see it being even worse if exponentially more albums instead. But just think it will inevitably be changed within days. It has been up for weeks already.

Are they trying to shed more people. I thought loads left at the time that MSW jumped ship opposing Joe Rogan, that group did come back at some point I still haven't worked out when. Are they thinking people will return and you will get loads of make up aural sex or something?

you can click on 'playlists' in the left hand menu to make it more or less like it was before.

I quit Spotify after Rogan and signed up for Qobuz. But Qobuz’ search function is shit and Spotify has a larger catalogue so I re-subscribed to Spotify (whomp whomp) and now I have both. May ditch them both for Apple Music now that they have the classical service, but I like also being able to buy albums from Qobuz.

you can buy albums from apple music too iirc, they still have the download service

when I said that group returned I was talking specifically about the MSW podcasts which I was surprised to find back on Spotify after making a big point of leaving in protest. Not sure what their return decision making was, them being on their own website meant I wasn't adding them to play queues and subsequently wasn't listening to them much for months. & don't know when the show reappeared on Spotify. Anybody come across what brought them back and when? I thought their reason for departure was still pretty featured on the platform.

This new interface is absolute fucking trash.

you can buy albums from apple music too

So jet to the store, and buy the LP
On Jive or RCA, cassettes and CD's

I like purchasing FLAC files though, not Apple's propreitary lossless and I'm too lazy to convert.

I have thousands aof CDs and thousands of Bandcamp purchases, I buy plenty of music, I just want Spotify to work properly.

Whataboutism

Now got the old playlists view back again - backlash-based reversion?

maybe you were/are caught in an A/B test

arrrr this new version is driving me nuts

it's so crazy that you can't just drag songs around in a playlist to reorder them. the tracks move under your finger, but nothing happens when you let go. instead you have to tap the three dots, then "edit", then reorder, then "save"

doubtless this has been complained about here before, but it's just kind of mind boggling

on the other hand, what glenn does, or part of what glenn does, eg the 'radio' feature that plays similar tracks based on what you were just listening to, is just an incredible achievement. i have found so much great stuff this way. it should be like, somehow preserved or made into a public utility, or put into the library of congress. a way of navigating the essentially limitless catalogue of recorded music with zero effort required on the user's part. it even feels like there is some effort put into varying tempos, varying deep cuts with popular tracks, but that may be a figment of my imagination

I found a similar feeling from the more limited resources of my ATRAC walkman which I returend to listening to on losing my phone a couple of weeks ago. That there is an algorithm that will sort music in a way that seems like tehre is somebody consciously djing still surprises me. I think that is about 20 years old so technology has probably improved no end. Still not worked out how it sorts things which seems to be right across genre and is presumably all AI there, the tracks on that were entered with my labeling which presumably means that tags were even less easily sorted.
Wonder what human input you would have on a system like spotify, is anybody sorting like to like in general to help guide algorithm at all. Or is it all based on some form of recognition of sample of track that I'd like to know more about.
Seems to be so much more than pure luck anyway. ^ wonder what selection process is and order of tracks played in etc etc.

Different Spotify features work different ways, and even I'm not always sure which bits of my work factor into which ones at any given moment.

But many of the things on everynoise.com are my attempts to give products of collective listening back to the world in some form. E.g. this recent addition is sort of an unpersonalized (and unrandomized) version of artist radio:

https://everynoise.com/canonicalpath.cgi

it's so crazy that you can't just drag songs around in a playlist to reorder them. the tracks move under your finger, but nothing happens when you let go. instead you have to tap the three dots, then "edit", then reorder, then "save"

You mean on mobile, right? Because you can definitely drag songs around on desktop. (Meanwhile, I thought it was impossible to do on mobile, so I'm glad to know there is a way, even if it's clunky.)

On the new desktop app there is no way to “go back” (like going back to a previous webpage) to a previous album.

On quick first viewing, that Canonical Path thing is pretty impressive. Thanks, Glenn!

You mean on mobile, right?

Right.

https://everynoise.com/canonicalpath.cgi

holy shit

Quite interesting. Generates quickly anyway. Not had a chance to actually listen to a playlist yet but interesting for suggestions at least.
I did try entering a few different artist names and saw that when artist's names appeared it was with the same song title. Does it stay that way until they're played or something or would it just play the same song by the artist when yhey came up.
I thought most interesting results were from artist's who spanned more than one genre. That generates a bunch of artist's for each genre listed. I saw that with MC5 and Louis Prima. Unfortunately not so much with Gun Club who didn't seem to have any roots, blues,jazz, country listed which are constituent parts of the sound I think.
I would mix across genre if I was creating a playlist anyway. But this does look great. Didn't see how long a playlist went on for saw it was over an hour, possibly 2.
I guess the existing continued playlist function if that is still present is likely to remain inside of a genre or 2. May be based on listeners history so May reflect that diversity.
I thought the search for Frank Hutchison yielded some interesting results too since I'd been meaning to look up other contemporaries of his who weredoing something similar.
So far can see its good for suggestions so May investigate it further with other entries.
Thanks for sharing.

Meat Puppets came up 3 or 4 times with Backwater, Birthday party a similar amount with Mr Clarinet , Swans with the same song too. I have multiple lps by all 3 of those that are all pretty interesting so hoping that any time a band turned up they wouldn't only be playing the same song each time.

JUst checked another bunch of artists as initial point and yeah do keep coming across teh same track by a few different bands. Which is a shame cos I would hope it was dynamic. Also haven't tried the same band as starting point twice so not sure if it would change each time.
& if it does change over time is there an element of feedback to things that would suggest what does and doesn't work for teh listener and therefore a level of customisation . Or is it just what it is and you have a playlist that's handy and will pass the time etc.

Just would definitely prefer it if the songs by the artists changed each time one created a playlist. These do have larger worthwhile catalogues. & sound that changed over time so songs from one era would fit a flow a lot better than others, which is also true of individual songs.

It chooses the most popular on Spotify track for each artist.

so you only get one track per band. Would it be possible to make things more flexible and choose from a top 5 or something.
The walkman random seems to have a core group it returns to every so often and plays a different track from the few that are in the player. I think it may have some default bands that it will mix to per artist to some extent.
That's just my experience with a player i have enjoyed listening to . I thought you had far more of a database of music you can access. But its up to you or whoever wrote the program.