Spotify - anyone heard of it?

so even asking spotify to stop automating any % of that would either mean a) smaller library, b) cost more money

Yes, the field in question is, in fact, already labeled exactly "Original Release Date". And then there are separate fields for copyright and publishing dates/credits, and then also separate on-sale dates for every region. That dreamy future in which the labels "still occasionally mess it up" is the reality you are already living in. Putting the onus on the labels and post-label cleanup are not two different alternatives, they're two unavoidable steps in the same unreliable process.

Which doesn't make it any less annoying, I realize. But we're doing what we can.

xpost

And yes, we get the same albums sent to us many, many times. We try to deal with that, too.

have you considered sending around a crew of bruisers to punch people in the face when the submit bad metadata? i've often dreamed of that!

we could be those bruisers

and will later be portrayed by Jonah Hill

this whole spotify vs. tidal vs. beats streetfight makes me so glad i've stayed within my itunes comfort zone and don't have to worry about which artist's exclusivity deal lands where. i'm just really hoping that when apple x beats is complete the roll-out doesn't simply take the form of an itunes update that doesn't let me add mp3s to my library ever again (the death of the ipood classic was a dark portent)

haha ipood

you paid money for mp3s, though

idk

let's not even get into the inability of seemingly every major music service to disambiguate between artists of the same name

Of course the labels provide unique identifiers for each artist. Which everybody diligently uses when reviewing them or tweeting or whatever.

Sparks is a particularly funny example xp

Have a horrible time trying to get spotify to recognize my mobile when plugged into my computer.

Where can I sign up to be a beta tester of this horrible software? If anything it will be cathartic for me to feel like I'm giving feedback through an official channel. Or hire me as a QA tester. I'll work for cheap.

I suspect part of the problem is Spotify doesn't handle large local file libraries well. The functions more or less normally until I try and access local files then the whole thing becomes an unresponsive piece of shit.

except local file libraries work great in older versions!

yeah I won't pay for spotify or any other service until they get the metadata thing solved---because I am silly I have spent a lot of time cleaning up my itunes library and if I could integrate that into some streaming service then that could work (maybe itunes beats w/e?) but I hate using the spotify client as it is today.

I've got used to working around spotify's shortcomings but while we're complaining about it, another issue is the [un]navigability of artists with big discographies, especially older artists with material which has been reissued in x number of compilations. there's all this effort to curate playlists etc. but there are lots of individual artists with hundreds of hours of recordings which are very difficult to wade through. someone like duke ellington is not well-served by arranging things by album & some sort of organized timeline way of looking through/filtering his recordings would be so much more user-friendly but I suspect we're doomed to have 18 versions of the same recording and an unusable compilations section

crowdsourcing, btw, would also be great for being able to somehow downvote shitty rerecorded versions of things so they fall to the bottom of search results, but I don't see any way to make that happen without it also turning into conservatives downvoting all rap music or whatever.

That's unlikely - look at RYM which is also based on crowdsourcing/voting and def doesn't downvote rap.

Well, maybe not that, but some other possible downsides I guess? I basically would only trust this feature if it was used only by ILM types.

ilm types downvoting all rock and indie?

while i am completely sympathetic to the urge to see crappy re-recordings blasted out of our way, they aren't just an annoyance for nerds like us - they represent independent record companies and artists looking for more income and rights. so even if spotify hadn't given equity to the majors - which would make vamoosing Cleopatra/Purple Pyramid type companies potential grounds for a collusion lawsuit - they're kind of a necessary evil if you actually care about things like artists rights

though again, as someone who's made more than his fair share of oldies playlists, i'd probably pop a beer if k-tel's redone crapola magically disappeared

someone like duke ellington is not well-served by arranging things by album & some sort of organized timeline way of looking through/filtering his recordings would be so much more user-friendly

well, quite, and the death of spotify apps makes me wonder if we've not just taken a huge step backwards

eh i really don't mind that aspect, i'm ok with spotify not being a music encyclopedia. the rest of the internet is pretty good at that.

organizing by dropdown tabs by label for each artist would go a long way towards making navigation easier.

if you're a label reissuing an album and you need to spend more than 5 seconds to remember what year the music was originally released, then maybe don't deserve to be on the internet anyway

a lot of labels list the current year as the original release date for reissues on purpose, for any number of reasons -- chief among them, i have always assumed, being that it forces the album to show up on top of an artist's discography in online services. labels aren't stupid. they know what they're doing.

i've worked at a couple streaming services, and cleaning up labels' metadata mistakes, omissions and white lies could be a full-time job for an army of humans, and they'd still never catch up.

organizing by dropdown tabs by label for each artist would go a long way towards making navigation easier.

that actually sounds like a nightmare to me. if i'm looking for a certain frank sinatra or duke ellington or guided by voices album, i don't want to have to go through five tabs trying to figure out which label put that one out.

but some kind of organizational system would definitely help. some of those long discographies are all but impossible to navigate. but i get that it isn't easy for services to do. that's manual labor. plus it requires making all sorts of subjective decisions that any two random music geeks could spend their lifetime arguing about. if a service could figure out a way to do it with crowdsourcing, yeah, maybe that.

cleaning up labels' metadata mistakes, omissions and white lies could be a full-time job for an army of humans, and they'd still never catch up

How might one get this job, btw? I'm looking presently.

yeah artists with big discographies... i just have to search for the album title too.

flac needs to happen. mp3s just don't do it. we shouldn't be regressing music quality with each new format like this. they should do a thing where you could pay a small fee for each album u wanted in flac. i don't need all flac, but i would maybe go up to £15pm for all flac everything.

^ tidal astroturfing

Tidal is your friend. You can also search for composers in there. It's not perfect but it sure helps.

Cleaning up metadata would pretty much be my dream job.

ctrl+f "remastered" DELETE ALL

that actually sounds like a nightmare to me. if i'm looking for a certain frank sinatra or duke ellington or guided by voices album, i don't want to have to go through five tabs trying to figure out which label put that one out.

New Spotify issue with the mobile app, it just seems to skip certain songs. Like it will transition from one song to the next one, the cover art will splash on the screen and then immediately go to the next song. I go back and it will just go to the next song again.

not as a default, as an option if you need it while searching

ah, ok. i'd co-sign that.

weird thing happened to me this morning. i was listening to michael jackson on spotify, plumbed through the stereo. my kids insist on this.

get out the door, start walking to work. fire up spotify and do a search for "joan jett" (don't judge me!) and spotify alerts me: you are controlling (your home computer)! do you want to continue, or listen here? i figured "listen here" meant on my phone, so i chose that, but it didn't work. the song kept stopping, and switching back to "thriller"! i'd start "hate myself for loving you again and again, but it kept stopping and switching back.

that remote control thing is great, never had a problem with choosing 'listen here' to switch back to the current device.

actually i think i have had a problem, stopping and restarting playback switches playback from the remote device to the current device. and you can't control the volume remotely.

At least once I've been unable to convince my tablet that no, I did not want to be listening to this album in shuffle; my hunch was that it had to do with it being halfway synched up with my PC (which wasn't playing along or anything, but when I used it later it was showing a song from that album as the 'current' track)? But I have no idea.

I think I'm almost done with Spotify. It's completely infuriating how they have slowly removed features that I use and the releases are buggier and buggier. They do not deserve my money.

What are my alternatives? Should I wait of the Apple/Beats streaming thing?

I haven't tried Rdio in a long time, but surely they're up to having a comparable catalogue at this point.

you can't go back to an earlier version as described upthread? xp

Not with mobile, which is what I use most of the time.

ah, didn't know that

Probably foolish of me to pursue this, but what the hell: Jeff, what features that you used got taken out of the mobile version? Most of the missing-feature complaints I know about have to do with the new desktop version...

Also: I recommended Rdio to a lot of people back when the Echo Nest was powering a bunch of their features, and although we aren't, any more, many of the things that make Rdio pleasant had nothing to do with us. If I had to move off Spotify, that's where I'd go.

Jeff wants his stars back, glenn. He just wants his stars.