Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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.

Here’s one. If I’ve “liked” an album, where do I go to find it later?

If you're on Windows, go grab the previous version 1.1.39.612 here (https://spotify.en.uptodown.com/windows/download/2368262), uninstall the latest version, install 1.1.39.612, and then follow the directions here (https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Stopping-Auto-update/td-p/4785101).

I've opened and closed the client several times since then and even rebooted my pc once and still no new version auto-downloaded.

I can't imagine this older version will be supported forever, but I'm gonna wring as much joy out of it as I can.

I am tempted, but last time I froze spotify various bits of functionality kept falling off each week and rendered it unusable in different ways.

Here’s one. If I’ve “liked” an album, where do I go to find it later?

Your library, the albums tab.

Duh. Not sure why that was so hard. Thanks ledge.

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.

― keto keto bonito v industry plant-based diet (PBKR), sobota, 8 maja 2021 14:46 (yesterday)

That's probably the most frustrating thing about the new UI to me (among, well, quite a few) - whenever I scroll through the saved albums in my library, if I randomly click on one, and then click back, it takes me to the top of the list.

(Windows desktop:) I'll grant that the search bar removal is far less annoying than the last time I was hit with it: now at least typing ctrl+L or clicking "Search" doesn't scroll the playlist sidebar to the top. I still dgi, though.

Other bad thing: Clicking "Your Library" semi-freezes the whole app for some time. I guess I'll just leave it for a while in case it's a one-time caching issue (I guess my library is kinda large with multiple levels of folders and so on).

Other good thing (which should be entirely unnecessary to even mention, ie it's incredible the bug wasn't fixed before): when e.g. adding to a playlist in the sidebar, the sidebar no longer blanks out, necessitating a scroll-wheel-back-and-forth-nudge to redisplay.

God, just listening to the Red Nation covering Star Wars and they've changed the slider at the bottom of the screen the thing that shows you where in the podcast you are into a lightsaber.
God you would think if they're able to do totally hokey shite like that they could allow the interface to be workable for the user.

Slightly surprised that that podcast would buy into something like that anyway. Just seems really gimmicky.
Is taht something that is happening anywhere else on Spotify. Like there was a handle showing from the start of that progress bar and the laser/light bit of the saber showed where the podcast had got to in its duration.
Like might be slightly impressed by it if there wasn't a set of new problems with actually setting up playlists and manouevre things into how I want to play them.
BUt they have time to do that? & it works ok on Ubuntu as well as windows and so on.

Apparently the light-saber-as-progress-bar thing goes back to 2015!

https://www.techradar.com/news/audio/here-s-how-to-get-a-lightsaber-progress-bar-in-spotify-1311566

I don’t care about the changes (nb I don’t make playlists just listen to albums).

I make playlists of the albums I like so I can find them easily. This is no longer the friction-free experience it used to be.

This is a complete disaster

Also like the way the new UI regularly does this every day after a while:
https://i.ibb.co/ZLgqztP/thingy.png

can i not add full albums to playlists from my phone anymore?

depends how determined you are and how much finger pressure you apply to your screen

I wish "Your Library" remembered tab position (Playlists/Podcasts/Artists/Albums). I'm normally opening Spotify to play a saved album, new UI added a click to get there.

Clicking through to an album from a playlist is bringing an awful lot of the 'three dots of doom', often resulting in a 'couldn't find that album' message.

dealing with podcast episodes on mobile has become completely counterintuitive. AFAICT there is no longer any way to just see a big list of recent episodes of the shows you're following? or if so it's a bunch of clicks deep; they seem to think i want to click into and out of each individual show and see what they've got. even if i have several episodes specifically downloaded, getting to a list of just THOSE doesn't seem to be possible - only within each show! bizarre. time to finally find a dedicated podcast listening app i guess.

FWIW, which I realized might not feel like much, the UI team (of which I am not part) is still actively working on fixing glitches with the new stuff and restoring bits of old behavior that weren't ever intended to be different...

Yeah I'm sure. I actually like the new feel overall, fwiw. I just wish there was a way to add shortcuts or otherwise make frequently accessed areas more, uh, accessible.

I think DC mentioned this, but I don't like how downloading a pod adds it to 'Your Episodes' but removing the download does not remove the pod from 'Your Episodes'.

So I'm seeing Recently Played has returned to the site but not the left hand column. It's on the home page which isn't what I tend to have open, hopefully that is going to be a first step in the right direction with some more along those lines coming.
MIne wasa bit out of date like it went back a few weeks instead of actual very recent usage. But it was a feature I relied on to some degree. It only holds a small number of titles though and I used to be able to access more of previous searches. Buut some good anyway.

FWIW, which I realized might not feel like much, the UI team (of which I am not part) is still actively working on fixing glitches with the new stuff and restoring bits of old behavior that weren't ever intended to be different...

― glenn mcdonald, Wednesday, May 12, 2021 4:19 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I have one question for these geniuses: "why?"

I have a second question: "how come?"

If those are rhetorical questions and you just don't like it, carry on.

If you want some actual explanation, there's this: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-future-of-our-desktop-apps/

Hit play on Discover Weekly for the first time in over a year. My guess is that they've been completely turning over the contents every week; would be cool if instead they just accumulated the highest-scoring tracks since my last listen.

So basically if you skipped a week, new tracks in DW would have to outscore old tracks to get a spot. I can see this being complicated - what if someone didn't play DW because they saw the playlist and didn't like it? In my case though, I hadn't even looked at DW.

But ... my DW kicks ass this week so maybe I should just shut it.

You can use IFTTT to auto save every Discover Weekly to a playlist. Very useful if you don’t have time to listen to it every week and don’t want to lose it!

tfw you pay $100 million dollars to someone to broadcast antivax propaganda and COVID conspiracy theories on your platform, insist that his opinions align with company policy doing so, and then he runs a three-hour ad for the white supremacist subscription service that launched the Proud Boys, run by a guy who was fired from his multi-million $ radio job after livetweeting himself harassing & abusing a black woman in Times Square, calling black people "not human" and "illegal savages."

https://i.imgur.com/mHcy4hy.jpg

apparently this episode also includes theorising that COVID was a Chinese bioweapon

Tidal pays 70% of their revenue in royalties, divided up by streams the same way Spotify and Apple pay. The "rate" is not a thing in itself, it's just the result of dividing total royalties paid by total streams. Tidal's main draw is the $20/mo HiFi plan, which nobody else offers, so presumably a significant share of their subscribers pay for that, but if 100m Spotify users all moved over to Tidal's regular $10 plan because Tidal's "rate" is higher, the rate would go down.

So does Apple’s announcement today that they’re not charging extra for their “HiFi” content – and Amazon immediately following suit – represent downward pressure in terms of compensating artists?

(Or am I still exhibiting the basic misunderstanding which Glenn was trying to correct with that post?)

Yes, I think that's accurate. Or, at least, it's a move that seems very likely to preclude any other service from using lossless audio as a higher-price tier.

Props to Johnny Fever for that tip re the desktop app, I followed it and it still hasn't auto-updated after several restarts. The only weird thing is that the version I grabbed from the old versions site was 1.1.39.612, but the version I have according to the help menu is actually 1.1.38.558.

why has it become so fucking painful to load my library after the recent changes