[HN Gopher] Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
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Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
Author : neilpanchal
Score : 941 points
Date : 2022-06-04 08:12 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (neil.computer)
(TXT) w3m dump (neil.computer)
| annnoo wrote:
| Just a side note: Iirc Spotify does not use Electron - it uses
| the Chromium embedded Framework. It is kinda the same as electron
| (it gives you an Browser) but instead of JavaScript you have to
| use C++ (or a wrapper around the library in you favourite
| language) to implement the Backend side of the app
| seandoe wrote:
| Hear hear! Spotify's UI/ux choices have frustrated me more and
| more over the years. Do any of their employees use their clients?
| Why is artist not a column that I can sort. Why such terrible
| uses of space? What happened to the social features? I'm not on
| any social platforms but it'd be fun to easily see, share,
| comment on friends' playlists.
| orestis wrote:
| The truncated text is a huge peeve of mine with designers. I get
| that it's hard to design a nice grid if you have to account for
| text that wrapped etc, but not everyone is called Tom Smith, and
| not all titles are 20 characters long.
|
| A designer I know advocated that users should be coaxed into
| using shorter titles and descriptions so that the UI looks good.
| It just makes me seethe.
| kashunstva wrote:
| > A designer I know advocated that users should be coaxed into
| using shorter titles
|
| My collection is 99% classical. The problem is especially bad
| for classical tracks. "Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op..." What
| opus, what movement? what tempo marking? Yes I'll go back and
| tell Beethoven to change the title to something shorter and
| catchier. "Joy, Bros!" Is that better?
|
| It's some kind hubris to think your UI (itself the result of
| design laziness) is a bigger priority than the integrity of the
| composer's intent.
| orestis wrote:
| Supposedly there's a classical version of Apple Music in the
| works, which should fix this.
| motoxpro wrote:
| https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/
|
| This is why they were advocating for "Concise Titles" instead
| of "Titles that are Short Enough to Read, but Long Enough to
| Convey Info!"
| DarylZero wrote:
| When you have 20 consecutive listings that all have the same
| first 80 characters, you don't even read those 80 characters.
|
| But the listing only shows the part you don't read!
| hyperdimension wrote:
| I agree. It's so anno...
| orestis wrote:
| Well sure, if we were building something towards general
| audience I'd say yes, let's bias our UI towards editorial
| rules that can be enforced, since incentives align.
|
| We're building enterprise-internal software. There's ton of
| jargon that is in play that we can't really shorten or guide.
| It's insane to think that the users, experts with decades of
| experience in their domain, should editorialize to fit a
| design goal. Sometimes, the users do know best.
| blenderdt wrote:
| I have been building websites for over 20 years and this has
| always been a problem. 99% of the designers also design texts
| that perfectly fit the design.
|
| The end result is a bad experience for both the developer, the
| customer and the end user.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| But if podcast art and beautiful-looking UIs aren't the most
| important things, then what will we do with all the UX people?
| danielovichdk wrote:
| I use Winamp for my MP3 collection that I downloaded of my T1
| line at the office.
|
| When I turn that mother up on and my CRT monitor starts smoking
| because of the Winamp addons that spikes all kinds of shit
| whenever the tune is changing, then I know I have found the right
| track.
|
| Then I get cracking on the floor. Break dancing and caps flying
| around. The neighbors come jumping in the door and starts
| clapping and the music just keeps going.
|
| Everybody can understand a list of songs, even my grandma who's
| pushing 84. So we battle out songs on each of ours computers, but
| we don't use Spotify any more.
| loceng wrote:
| What skin and visualizer are you using?
| tarboreus wrote:
| Has to be dancing baby visualizer.
| [deleted]
| pnut wrote:
| Forgive me if I'm wrong but I suspect this comment is GPT3
| generated. Regardless, it was hilariously absurd.
| hanoz wrote:
| Oh no, can it already be that the memory of 90s internet
| culture is indistinguishable from the mad ravings of an
| intelligent machine?
| joshspankit wrote:
| The _neon_ Turing test.
| _moof wrote:
| Oh dear. You're about to be kicked off so many lawns.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| No GPT here. Just CRT and MP3.
| [deleted]
| mritchie712 wrote:
| I thought this was a scene from a movie.
|
| If it's not, please write it.
| seandoe wrote:
| We should hang out some time.
| Cipater wrote:
| Now THAT'S whipping the llama's ass.
| rsanheim wrote:
| I refused to use Spotify from early on because it is so anti-
| album. The interface just sucks for playing albums, and its
| ridiculous that they haven't fixed it. Playlists are fine for
| parties or when you want to discover new music, but if you are
| doing more focused listening albums are the way to go.
|
| I use Apple Music for streaming / high quality downloads while on
| the go or airplaying around the house, and Roon
| (https://roonlabs.com) for dedicated in-home album listening. Its
| definitely a more expensive combo than Spotify, but worth it.
| jnurmine wrote:
| IMO the Spotify Android UI is OK for the most part.
|
| That said, Spotify could improve the UX.
|
| For one thing, recommendations are fine but how about reduce the
| amount of lists. Let the user click something if they want
| recommendations based on feeling or genre or "more like x", etc.
|
| To illustrate the previous point, when I open the app, there are
| these lists: Your top mixes Made for
| Recently played More like x Your shows
| Genre/feeling recommendation Musiken att ha koll pa
| Genre recommendation For today's drive (but WHY?)
| More like y More of what you like Genre
| recommendation Genre recommendation Genre
| recommendation Discover something new New releases
| for you Discover i Discover j, Genre again,
| Genre.
|
| Why is my New releases near the bottom? Why do I even have a
| "Musiken att ha koll pa" with some pop songs I couldn't care less
| about -- and besides, why is the title in Swedish though the app
| is in English? Why are there like 7 genre suggestions?
| Cardiox12 wrote:
| If you're sick of Spotify UI you can use https://spicetify.app/,
| you will probably find a theme you will like.
| jkdufair wrote:
| If you are an Emacs user, check out Smudge.
| https://github.com/danielfm/smudge
|
| It gives you just such a list.
| alaricus wrote:
| I hate the modern designs like this in apps or websites.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It seems like we moved back in time somehow. To a time before
| Windows 95. We use to have multiple applications running, each
| in their own little Window, on a low resolution monitor.
| Windows where no bigger than you could reasonably justify,
| because you didn't know other programs the user might be
| running at the same time, on their tiny monitor. Our monitor
| are bigger than ever, higher resolution, yet many applications
| are designed as if they would have the entire screen to
| themself.
| joshspankit wrote:
| No.
|
| Because even though you pay for the subscription, they are still
| getting paid to promote artists, albums, and tracks while also
| trying to keep you on the platform for more time by offering
| playlists made by themselves (more opportunity to promote) or
| other users.
| WeZzyNL wrote:
| What I hate most about Spotify is: after meticulously adding
| songs to a queue, accidentally tapping a song near the end of the
| queue just to see the entire queue being cleared up to that song.
|
| It's just mind-boggling and creates some sort of anxiety during
| using the app.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Ended up canceling my Spotify, in part because of how bad the UX
| is.
| fullshark wrote:
| No because Spotify needs to turn its music catalog listeners into
| (proprietary) podcast listeners. Possibly proprietary
| playlists/recommendation radio streams as well. Same reason why
| Netflix pushes originals over licensed content.
|
| It's incredibly annoying but haven't yet heard a compelling
| reason to switch to apple music.
| nathell wrote:
| > Foobar2000? where are you? Do you still have that tattoo on
| your arm that screams "FUNCTIONALISM"?
|
| F2K is at https://www.foobar2000.org/, it works just as well as
| ever, and, yes, still has that tattoo. I'm happily using the Mac
| version on Big Sur.
| VistaBrokeMyPC wrote:
| Foobar2k and Lidarr is where it's at. I went full circle back
| to sailing the seven seas because streaming services got so
| bloated and user-friendly in my opinion.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Anytime someone mentions a table of songs it makes me miss Rdio
| even more. Their UI was almost perfect for how I listened to
| music.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I feel like I have such a disconnect from most others with these
| services.
|
| I tried out Pandora one night when it first came out while I was
| in college in 2004/2005. Then it was "someone made an algorithm
| that can pick music for you!" After about 15 minutes I lost
| interest "Hm that's neat, I'm good though I know what I like"
|
| Fast forward 17 years and you have these multibillion dollar
| companies everyone loves and hates, controversies. I never saw
| the appeal in the first place.
| jeandejean wrote:
| I so fucking agree. That 5 songs only for each damn artist, that
| makes you browse through albums... What an outrage! I just gave
| up and don't use the app anymore. So frustrating.
| [deleted]
| golemotron wrote:
| It's easy to find bad UX in the industry, and I think that the
| reason is that it doesn't have to be good. It's hardly ever the
| differentiator that makes a difference when you choose to
| subscribe or not. The same could be said about the UX of Google
| services, etc. Capital flows to acquiring new subscribers and,
| grudgingly, to retaining old ones.
| gimme_treefiddy wrote:
| I've developed such a inadvertent hatred for Spotify because of
| their app.
| motoxpro wrote:
| Dear Spotify, please do not go back to 2001. Thanks.
|
| On a serious note. If all you do is high intent searches (I know
| exactly the one song/podcast I want), Spotify is not for you.
| Spotify is about discovery. Stick to iTunes or Winamp or Kazaa or
| Youtube or anything else that just gives you a list of things.
| Don't make the product worse because you're using it for
| something it's not designed around.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| A bad search UI is a bad search UI. Saying that Spotify is
| about discovery makes it even worse. Why wouldn't they have a
| functional UI for searches then?
|
| Also quit the Spotify exceptionalism please. YouTube has a
| discovery algorithm that is as good, plus there's tons of niche
| music on YouTube that you will never find on Spotify, because
| it wouldn't be easy to get a deal to have it on the platform
| (royalties blabla)
| ksdnjweusdnkl21 wrote:
| Why not both?
| basisword wrote:
| Spotify is not "about discovery". It's supposed to be the
| service you use to play music (and now general audio). Whether
| that's new music, old music, playlists, your library, it
| doesn't matter. They want you to use Spotify for all your music
| needs.
| opportune wrote:
| I think one reason companies have been doing this lately is
| because a surprisingly large population of computer users are
| only semi-literate (low education or just children). So if you're
| doing UX Research you'll actually notice this more visual, non-
| textual UI does "better" in a lot of metrics
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Do you have any sources for this?
|
| I'd be interested to read more about it. Why in general the UX
| in a lot of apps has been dropping (for me).
|
| It's like information density doesn't matter anymore.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I think the inconsistent mess of Spotify is what most people
| actually want, because back in the day I remember constantly
| hearing from people how much they hated iTunes. This Neil fellow
| and myself are the ones with the weird taste in software, not the
| UX experts behind Spotify.
| dhbsnanasn wrote:
| Try https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue! It's macOS native,
| blazing fast, scriptable in Guile (GNU's Scheme), and keyboard-
| driven, if you're so inclined.
| jasonkester wrote:
| Amazon's Kindle app is an even bigger offender in this category.
| It shows your library as a 4 x 4 grid of tiny cover thumbnail on
| your phone, so there is no hope whatsoever of reading a title.
|
| So you click one, and what does it do? It downloads the whole
| book then drops you in at whatever page you last read, then hides
| the book title and author.
|
| Unless you can recognize the cover photo (which changes to match
| the latest edition), there is really no way to know what you're
| going to get except to guess.
| layer8 wrote:
| > It shows your library as a 4 x 4 grid of tiny cover thumbnail
| on your phone
|
| You can switch to list view in the "[?]" menu (at least on
| iOS).
| logbiscuitswave wrote:
| When browsing games on the Xbox it's the same way -- just a
| grid of cover art in smallish tiles. No text.
|
| Finding what I want can be very difficult if the text isn't
| clearly visible in the cover art or if it's not art I'm very
| familiar with.
|
| Even the fact that it's sorted A-Z doesn't help because it
| often sorts titles starting with "The" under "T". Sigh.
|
| UI designers: just give me a list view option. Please.
| stockerta wrote:
| Or in my case, dear spotify, I don't care about the damn
| podcasts, never was, never will, don't fckign show me them. I
| don't care.
| [deleted]
| gverrilla wrote:
| optimized for brain-washing and diminished/diminishing agency
| jdblair wrote:
| If I had to guess, Spotify is optimizing for engagement and
| listening hours, not searchability.
| JohnnyHerz wrote:
| OMGEEEE +1000 for the OP
| drdd wrote:
| Dear spotify user, can you just delete your account
| heckerhut wrote:
| Foobar2000 was hands down the best time for music in the pc era
| roansh wrote:
| Emacs has a plug-in.
|
| Slightly off topic but.. couldn't resist
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Netflix and Amazon are terrible. Want to continue what you were
| watching? Gonna have to find where we hid that this time, g'luck!
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Which they openly admit to doing on purpose to "increase
| engagement" or whatever, even attaching a monetary value to
| shoving new stuff in your face before you can finish the old
| stuff.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| This is why I believe _forced interoperability_ is essential
| to the future of online consumer tech. We 've discussed it
| here in the context of social media monopoly regulation, but
| it has far greater implications.
|
| Salient examples are the alternative Twitter interfaces that
| proliferated, and indeed those for Hacker News. One huge
| benefit is that users won't be stuck with a single, often
| hostile UI, but be free to either interpret data client-side,
| or make use of a possible open market in presentation layer
| websites which may add their own value.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That would be cool, but then some of those interfaces
| (probably the ones with the most ad funding) would be part-
| owned by one of the streaming services and would push their
| content the most. Feels like it'd be just one more hull on
| the Titanic.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Which is fine as long as the better ones are available.
| barnabee wrote:
| Couldn't agree more.
|
| Infrastructure/service providers cannot be allowed to
| continue to control the interfaces that are used to access
| their services.
| buro9 wrote:
| Disney is worse. Which itself is unbelievable as Amazon Prime
| and Netflix set a very low bar.
| jmmcd wrote:
| But Apple TV (the streaming service that I can access on the
| web, not the hardware smart TV thing) is much worse than
| Disney. Literally can't find the name or number of the
| episode that I'm currently watching in order to tell my wife.
| aniforprez wrote:
| The apple TV app on the mac is utterly horrendous. On my M1
| macbook, it lags every time you queue something for
| download or delete an episode or try to view the details of
| an episode or series. It's so dumb that a first party app
| lags on their own line of hardware. Not to mention just how
| horrible the UX is. None of the clickable elements turn the
| cursor into a pointer and it takes just a little too long
| for the hover to trigger which makes it really irritating
| to use. The player is just as terrible. It automatically
| opens in full screen and is missing a lot of small quality
| of life features that other players have had for decades.
| Even as the cheapest subscription service I just cannot put
| up with how horrible it is
| mjlee wrote:
| John Siracusa, a fairly well known Apple pundit, wrote one of
| his semi-annual blog posts on this -
| https://hypercritical.co/2022/02/17/streaming-app-sentiments
|
| It's a follow up to an earlier article where he lays out the
| table stakes for streaming apps, both worth reading.
| lightbendover wrote:
| I found it incredibly amusing to sit through spec discussions
| of {big company's} new shiny long-term A/B success metric a
| few years ago. Hundreds of inputs, ML-based modeling, etc..
| all to decide if change #574843 will eventually make more
| money or not. CX scoring was hotly debated as a model input
| and was ultimately voted against. Companies don't care if you
| enjoy your experience, they only care if you engage and spend
| money. Streaming, social media, retail, gaming; they're all
| full of dark patterns that lead to bad experiences so the
| company makes an extra buck. Honestly, I'm tired of this
| industry.
| intothemild wrote:
| It's why I'm being driven back to piracy, because the UI/UX is
| do horrible on these platforms, that and believe it or not
| because Content discovery is easier a couple of the piracy apps
| look at what I have in my collection, and do recommendations
| off that... And guess what.. it's really good.
|
| So a bunch of people in their spare time seem to be doing a
| better job than Netflix, why is that? Because I don't think
| Netflix is trying to achieve the same goal
|
| They are trying to push content Netflix wants you to watch. Not
| content that you want to watch.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Do what you want, of course, but no one is driving you there.
| You're freely walking towards a luxury good offered for
| nothing.
| solarkraft wrote:
| The beauty of piracy is that people go through an effort to
| share what they like, not what some company wants to push on
| you, which rewards high quality.
| kroltan wrote:
| As Gabe Newell said,
|
| > If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7,
| purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer,
| and the legal provider says the product is region-locked,
| will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and
| can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the
| pirate's service is more valuable.
|
| Nowadays I exclusively pirate movies and shows, because just
| the thought of having to spend 30 minutes to figure out where
| some movie is, then trying to navigate the respective
| service's interface, just to be presented with a not-empty-
| but-actually-doesnt-show-what-i-was-searching-for-because-
| stats-said-people-might-watch-more-if-you-mislead-them-in-
| search-results-pages because it is not available on my
| region, and then trying to figure out what combination of VPN
| and region incantations won't block me behind a million
| captchas, is too much work to be bothered with.
|
| Instead, I just open Stremio, put in the movie or show name,
| and even if it is some obscure Javanese arthouse film from
| the '20s (I don't know if such a thing exists, but you get
| the point) it will find it. Sure, finding a source with good
| availability is sometimes not the first-click experience, but
| it's still at least 10 times faster than all the above. And I
| can put on screen sharing to watch it with my friends without
| DRM blacking out the screen.
|
| Worst of all, the pricing structures of streaming apps are
| very opaque, so if I were to do the still-illegal-but-
| morally-correct thing of paying for the official product and
| pirating anyways, I don't think any of my subscription fee
| would actually go to the company that made that film.
|
| I wish we had a functioning rental model still. Go to some
| storefront, pay a small amount of money to get any
| publisher's title, get a video file to play "at home" (in
| your preferred video player), pinky swear you didn't rip it,
| done. The closest you get is the Youtube rental thingy, but
| at least over here it is incredibly overpriced, costs more
| than a cinema ticket. Or buying physical media, but then you
| have to pay the physical distribution costs, keep around
| shiny plastic donuts and specialized machinery.
|
| ---
|
| And besides, I'm still not sold on algorithmic
| recommendations, and watch things mostly based on meatspace
| recommendations.
|
| Subscription services have one simple goal: provide just
| enough value to keep one from cancelling their subscription.
| There is no real incentive to do better if all the
| competitors have the same goal and behaviour, which is the
| current situation. So they raise the prices a little bit,
| skip on user-motivated UX, and double down on mediocre "just
| good enough to idly waste time on" content, and slowly bring
| down the user expectations about content and how to find it,
| placing them in a "learned helplessness" state of not being
| arsed to find what they like themselves.
| wharfjumper wrote:
| What apps do you recommend?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I have the same issues with all of these services. But I'm
| wondering if it's some kind "expert mode" issue which is only
| a problem for a small advanced-user minority - many of whom
| will be reading HN.
|
| Do most users _want_ to be told what to consume?
|
| Circumstantially I'd guess so, because otherwise it's a lot
| of effort to add friction for no reason.
|
| But I don't know.
|
| Possibly Spotify and Netflix do. Or possibly not. Perhaps
| they're just dysfunctional?
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I can see regular people struggling with Netflix when I'm
| at some elses home. I don't have a huge sample size though.
|
| For me is that I just refuse to pay because I know they can
| just do a regular interface but they want to trick you into
| some stuff with their UI.
|
| I just don't feel in the mood of paying for being treated
| as laboratory mice.
| kroltan wrote:
| A better question is _can most users be inconvenienced into
| preferring to be told what to consume?_
|
| As a sibling commenter says, these issues are not an
| "expert mode" problem, you can see regular people facing
| them too. But they usually give up and eventually comply,
| watching something else. The frustration is still there,
| but we bitch about it and try something else, while a bunch
| of people just go watch Trending Show #229.
|
| (I realize it might sound harsh/pretentious/"sheeple", but
| it genuinely happened to me last month. I wanted to watch
| Truman Show with my nephew at my sister's house, and it was
| a genuine clown show to try to find a service that would
| play it. Netflix didn't have it, their ISP's service didn't
| have it, it was available on Apple TV but we couldn't get
| the device to work because it required an update and we
| didn't have a computer at hand to be able to pair it or
| whatever, I was there so we even tried casting from a
| piracy app in my phone, but their Smart TV only accepted
| some weird proprietary method that was not available on my
| phone, so we ended up watching El Camino, a terribly
| mediocre Breaking Bad spinoff, my nephew was bored halfway
| through and went to play Fortnite instead)
| solarkraft wrote:
| > Do most users want to be told what to consume?
|
| I like "lean-back listening" and that's the whole reason
| I'm still sticking with Spotify. They (almost) always have
| something to accompany my mood both out of songs I already
| like and new ones I often also like (yay!). The drift in
| mood is minimal. I can listen to calm piano music for a
| whole night while Apple music can shift over to loud metal
| within only a few songs (what a joke).
|
| It may be getting worse, though. Especially a few songs
| keep playing over and over, sometimes despite me explicitly
| blocking them. Both a lot of new or familiar songs often
| show up at times at which I want just the other - and of
| course you can't choose (what a joke! The algorithm is
| great, just badly tuned, let me change it!).
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Something funny about Netflix: after they implemented double
| thumbs up they made the three buttons (two thumps up, one,
| thumbs down) hidden behind one thumbs up icon and exposed on
| hover. Next to the My List button. The double thumbs up then is
| superimposed on the My List button. So if I move my cursor from
| right to left in order to remove some show from my List I might
| give it two thumbs up instead.
| WiSaGaN wrote:
| I wonder why they haven't fixed that already. Even just
| recording the button clicking sequence alone, they should
| have more than enough data in which people clicking thumbs up
| button before immediately unclick it and click 'list' to show
| that it is a bad design.
| lemursage wrote:
| Agreed, I feel that in the case of Netflix et al., it's just
| orders of magnitude more ridiculous -- may I just get the list
| of the films instead of being force spoon-fed crap content,
| please? I don't even know how to begin to tell the recommender
| engine that it's completely missing my preferences. That would
| be somewhat digestible if their search experience wasn't
| terrible as well -- no facet search, no dynamic category
| browsing? What the heck.
| pigeonhole123 wrote:
| It feels like these design choices are there to hide the fact
| that their catalog is tiny (maybe especially in Europe). The
| majority of what I search for just displays things that are
| similar to what I actually wanted to watch. For example if I
| search for Family Guy I get some off-brand Netflix cartoon in
| the "irreverent" category.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Yeah, they can't even tell you they don't have it. I wanted
| to watch luchshe chem liudi (Better Than Us), which was
| recommended to me by a co-worker as available on Netflix.
|
| It looks like I was too late and it had left their
| catalogue again, but anything I found on the internet was
| either "look at this nice show available on Netflix"
| (posted 2 years ago) or, very very rarely, a Netflix page
| with a grayed out play button. Again, no explanation.
|
| It was the first time in a long while I had opened it and
| also the last.
| lemursage wrote:
| One more thing I've also noticed. I wanted to exchange
| movies with a Turkish friend. We both realised that the
| best movies/series from our regional Netflix offerings
| are not available in other's Netflix feed. The only
| available movies were either regional Netflix productions
| (of contestable quality) or absolutely low-quality non-
| Netflix productions. Bad search does not help in
| conscious discovery either. I cannot understand why the
| best regional movies/series/classics are not shared
| between regions (excluding UK and US maybe). Those that
| happen to be available had a very lackluster translation.
| I doubt this is exclusively licensing issue, but I may be
| wrong.
| thegabez wrote:
| The entire UX is clunky, how does this even happen?
| miduil wrote:
| At the same time I met a five year old who'd show me how they is
| finding their favorite songs on Spotify, even though they can't
| read yet. I feel like "I need my plain text interface back,
| yesterday"-folks maybe don't consider how many different people
| are actually using these apps.
| corney91 wrote:
| Spotify has a dedicated kids app for those with a family plan,
| it's one thing I miss from my subscription. However the
| interface is basically the same as the full version so maybe
| the developers think adults use apps in the same way as
| children...
| brunooliv wrote:
| Spotify used to be absolutely amazing, it really was!! It was my
| go to platform... Now it's just embarrassingly BAD and
| essentially unusable unless you're paying for it
| arooaroo wrote:
| And it's not exactly a UX paradise if one is a premium customer
| either. I really find the UI hard work on desktop and mobile.
|
| If and when Apple Music introduces a Duo equivalent tariff I
| will jump ship, for many reasons but a significant one is that
| I use Spotify exclusively for music yet it's UI takes up a
| significant amount of premium space for podcasts. Apple had
| seen the light and spun off podcasts to a separate app from
| music.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| I mean, if it's free anything above zero is good. Barely
| useable is still useable.
| raydiatian wrote:
| Quick Google search says they net about $5/mo per free user
| on ads alone.
|
| I'd honest rather go back to buying the albums.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| Not even paying is enough. I pay for it with gift cards, and
| the UI for renewing my balance is really, _really_ bad. And the
| last time my subscription lapsed it brought down the entire app
| with it. I had to uninstall everything and clear the cache.
|
| The only reason I still use it is because I need a music
| discovery service that takes gift cards and has an offline
| mode. But guess what? On my last flight there was some error on
| Spotify's servers and even my local songs in offline mode
| stopped working.
|
| I do my best to support Spotify seeing as it is one of the few
| tech platforms not controlled by the usual suspects. But they
| are making it _really_ hard for me.
| mszcz wrote:
| Yeah, and that whole Spotify HiFi fiasco? Announce and not
| deliver? I put off buying good headphones waiting for those
| assholes. Year end came, cancelled my subscription out of
| spite, went for Tidal and bought the headphones. As soon as
| Qubuz becomes available I'll try that.
| al_borland wrote:
| I mostly quit listening to Joe Rogan's podcast after it left
| YouTube. I'd watch when he had an interesting guest that showed
| up in my recommendations. A while back a co-worker told me about
| a recent episode I should check out. Reluctantly, I went to
| Spotify to check it out. It took me a good 20 minute, and a lot
| of just scrolling through page after page of podcasts, until I
| actually found it. You'd think after spending $50M on the guy
| they wouldn't make it so hard to find. The search and navigation
| was horrendous. I listened to maybe 20 minutes of the podcast,
| quit to go do something else, and never went back.
|
| I don't particularly like what Apple Music has become, when
| compared to the iTunes from the music-only era, but it's still
| dramatically better than Spotify.
| sqqqqrly wrote:
| I've recently started using Spotify premium again. I'm amazed at
| the crappy ui. Often go back to radioparadise.com to not have to
| deal with it.
| neximo64 wrote:
| I actually hate this thing Spotify does. Before they had a way to
| sorting songs by playcount and it made it easy to find songs youd
| instantly like.
|
| To increase cross sell with underrepresented artists or whatever
| the strategy is with this UI its quite a detriment when looking
| for songs you want.
|
| If i wanted to discover artists id like to be able to do that
| myself, not have it be imposed on my search because of the way
| the designer thought it up, to increase cross sell to things i
| had no intention of listening to.
|
| It's almost like a paid version of spam.
| orangeoxidation wrote:
| > It's almost like a paid version of spam.
|
| Well put.
|
| It seems they are trying to optimize for listener time. It
| makes sense for the free offering as listening time is
| advertisement time is income.
|
| But for the paid version what they should strive for is
| costumer satisfaction.
|
| Turns out that's a lot harder to measure and related, but not
| at all the same as listening time or 'engagement'.
|
| Taking thrice as long and twice as many clicks to get where I
| want to be increases the engagement metric and my
| dissatisfaction.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Just pull up a top played playlist?
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Alsothe API is exposed and really easy to use.
| afiori wrote:
| Too bad Spotify is primarily a consumer app and not a
| Music-Streaming Salas to be used by third parties
| 867-5309 wrote:
| >It's almost like a paid version of spam
|
| time to sail those musical seas
| hammock wrote:
| There is a great website someone put up called "sort my music"
| and also "organize your music". If you google those terms they
| are the first and second result.
|
| It will allow you to sort Spotify playlists by a number of hidden
| variables like BPM and year of release. You can also export/copy
| paste the tables that it generates in the process.
|
| Not perfect and might not fit your exact use case, but wanted to
| let HN know.
| maxique wrote:
| Those tools and more are on Playlist Machinery
| (http://www.playlistmachinery.com/)
| hammock wrote:
| Wow they have added so much
| tarboreus wrote:
| I think it says a lot when people hate Spotify this much and then
| feel like they have to use it. There are comments here about
| buildling your an entire new interface to Spotify. At that point,
| shouldn't you just...not use Spotify? What would Spotify have to
| do to you to get you to not use it, sneak into your house at
| night and do something to the family pet?
| kalev wrote:
| Agree to this. I recently wanted to see a list of songs of one
| artist. I could not find it..
| zorr wrote:
| On desktop you might get something like this when navigating to
| an Artist page, find the Discography section and click the
| "show all" button. On the resulting page top right there is a
| dropdown where you need to select "All" instead of "albums" and
| make sure the list icon is active instead of the grid icon.
| Then it shows a list of songs segmented by release.
| 1ark wrote:
| I have been using spotify-qt[1] lately. It's quite close to the
| original client from more than 10 years ago.
|
| 1. https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt
| srinathkrishna wrote:
| Ah, foobar2000 - had such fun with that app back in the day!
| fleddr wrote:
| This kind of "discovery" UI sucks. You see it everywhere now. A/B
| testing, out of touch design teams and algorithms have overtaken
| basic common sense.
|
| Spotify has many teams working on the UI of their app, could be
| 100+ people, perhaps even hundreds. Isn't that absurd when the UI
| of any classic music/media player is superior?
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| We live in an age of poor design. Advertisement and dark patterns
| run rampant and reduce the functionality and usability of our
| software all the time.
|
| That being said Spotify still somehow stands out as a case study
| in how not to design an interface. What's worse is that the
| mobile apps are specifically designed with electron under the
| assumption that it will make cross platform development
| easy...but it breaks on every device in different ways.
|
| It's sad because I hate having to maintain a large music catalog
| manually but no music service really provides an adaquite
| solution to this and the system with the most extensive library
| is sadly...the worst platform for it. I hope they get better but
| I've been hoping that for years at this point.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I am glad I am not alone hating these kind of user hostile
| designs which is a trend nowadays. I departed Spotify long ago
| but its pair, the Tidal is at least as bad, some may say (me!
| me!) that is much worse.
|
| It took about ca. 2-3 years for them to get to a state where you
| click on a song and it plays it. With no long delay, no stutter,
| ability to skip into a specific spot, almost no crash. With still
| no decent playlist support (2-3 years more work to develop this
| cutting edge revolutionary concept to an entry level), but it was
| enough to switch for HiFi quality. Since then there was a tiny
| addition to playlists, fairly usefule if you now where the traps
| are, but they did a bunch of making it flashy and big, with very
| limited advancement on functionality. In fact, basic
| functionality got f..d up here and there! Drag and drop makes
| random things, search bar jumps all over the place,
| album/playlist info only visible topmost or much scrolled down
| position, in between just a big emty space. Which ironically can
| react to click! They introduced the invisible item gets clicked
| concept. Funny. : / Lists go to the very edge, visually cluttered
| navigation and item text, invisible title bar to drag (but click
| slightly elsewehere and it will start some song). And the most
| bloated search results, yes! They make it exceptionally hard to
| find what you need, in pair with Spotify. And the same kind of
| suggestions and trends and lists and whatnot, but your own
| favourites are pushed back somewhere. Their choices have the
| prime location not your own! How hostile is that?! (very!)
|
| Looks like they hired the slowest working most incompetent UX/UI
| designers, turning the usability into an ever descending spiral.
|
| But on the positive side.... well, nothig. It is huge, slow like
| f..k, bloated, a nighmare to use.
|
| As soon as I pick up building an offline file cathalog again I
| will go back to the good old days of owning my songs and copying
| the file I want to have in the centre. This streaming kind of
| hostile nighmare is not for me. I am thinking about collecting my
| complaints into a post but it is a long work. And futile anyway.
| I tried to communicate problems with them but they do not listen.
| They try to change my behaviour first, also asking about things I
| already told them, seems like not even reading my mail in full.
| So likely will just go away while emitting little puffs of smoke
| through my ears.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Same clusterfuck on Amazon Music. It's like they don't want you
| to find anything. It constantly adapts based on some algorithm
| and it is parallizing.
| midislack wrote:
| I don't think people understand the purpose of Spotify and every
| user interaction they engage you with. Spotify is not for you -
| you're not the customer. Big labels are. Podcasters are. You're a
| product and you're being shown what's been paid for.
|
| Why do people couch their interactions with big tech as if they
| matter? What are you going to do, NOT use Spotify? Fat chance.
| Taywee wrote:
| I'm so irritated with Spotify. Deezer is a bit better, but not a
| hell of a lot. I was a CD buyer and music pirate for a very long
| time, and while music streaming has helped me find a lot of new
| music, it has come with many frustrations as well. The biggest
| problem is the slow slide from convenience into a pre-packaged,
| curated experience, leveraging the audience for extra revenue. I
| know it's inevitable when companies need to maintain constant
| growth, but I can't help but get a little angry when I'm paying
| for a service, and I'm STILL the product to be sold for
| advertising dollars. The old adage of "if you aren't paying for
| it, you are the product" doesn't apply anymore. It's now
| basically "If it is a service, you are the product".
|
| You can't customize any of these home screens. You can't tell
| them to STOP SHOWING ME PODCASTS I DON'T LISTEN TO PODCASTS. You
| can't reset your listening profile to get back to a vanilla
| experience (especially applicable if you use your account for
| multiple different things. I don't listen to the same music while
| working as I do while working out, or actual "just sit-and-listen
| to music" sessions, and I also use music for D&D sessions, so all
| my suggested music ends up being a terrible mishmash. Spotify's
| suggestion here is to pay for multiple accounts.
|
| Even the AI and suggested music is wearing thin. Both Spotify and
| Deezer just give me the same exact tracks constantly, 99% of it
| is very mainstream, well-known stuff, and I haven't discovered
| any new music in over a month, despite listening for at least 4
| hours a day. I kind of want to go back to just pirating
| everything again. It's actually pathetic that these top-of-the-
| line services offer less flexibility, power, and control than
| just pirating music and sticking it on your PMP did 15 years ago.
| It's sad.
|
| At least Bandcamp is still a thing, but then I've got an annoying
| library split. I can't mix my bought Bandcamp tracks in with
| Deezer or Spotify.
|
| Why are these the options? Pay out the nose for music (if you're
| a serious listener, $150 gets you 10 albums, which I can get
| through in three days). Be a criminal. Pay for a subscription
| that gives you no control and sells you to advertisers.
| daigoba66 wrote:
| I still miss Rdio.
| copperx wrote:
| I've heard that Spotify recommendations are top notch, but its
| terrible UX keeps me from switching from Apple Music (which sucks
| in different ways, but search is much better).
| rplst8 wrote:
| It's not just Spotify that has this problem. All major,
| successful web applications have huge usability issues.
|
| Software becomes successful not because of how it looks, but
| because of how it helps humans in their daily lives. The current
| fad is form over function to the nth degree.
| chx wrote:
| So we just forgot Joe Rogan and continued with Spotify as if
| nothing happened? Cool, cool.
| ByteJockey wrote:
| I mean, yeah?
|
| Are you new to internet drama? People use it to feel high and
| mighty for a couple weeks and get some sweet, sweet dopamine
| hits, and then they go back to doing exactly what they were
| doing before.
| boesboes wrote:
| I f'ing hate spotify with a passion. The shit UX and them pushing
| JRE and other bullshit podcasts I dont want or need in my life
| was bad, but for me the final straw was that they decided to show
| me popups for their shit playlists when I was trying to put on
| one some music.
|
| Found out they have been doing it for years to people, and if you
| complain they basically refer you to the suggestion box and to go
| f yourself. I don't get it. Why would you want to torment paying
| customers like that? Just leave me alone and let me play some
| music you psycopaths.
|
| So I switched back to Apple music. It's pretty shit, but at least
| I get to decide what I want to listen too.
| basisword wrote:
| >> So I switched back to Apple music. It's pretty shit, but at
| least I get to decide what I want to listen too.
|
| I love and hate Apple Music. The library style interface is
| great. But for a company that hangs on about the virtue of
| native apps the Music app is complete dogshit. Even with the
| recent slightly more native "rewrite" I still spend ages
| waiting for screens to load. Spotify is so much snappier.
| karatinversion wrote:
| Surprised by this comment - in my experience, Spotify is the
| only application I've used which takes a noticeable time to
| render its window when I alt-tab to it.
| basisword wrote:
| I mean alt-tabbing to it isn't really 'using' it. I was
| referring to searching, clicking links to albums/playlists
| etc. with Apple Music these all load like a webpage so you
| get a white screen while they load.
| 0x00000000 wrote:
| My biggest issue with it is that every time my phone connects
| to bluetooth Apple Music starts playing my entire library on
| shuffle wasting all of my data and battery and there is no
| way to turn off this feature. It seriously has me
| contemplating switching but the alternatives are not
| appealing.
| basisword wrote:
| Definitely a bug and not a feature. I've never had this
| happen, ever.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Hey something about this comment just seemed a bit over the top
| negative/angry and didn't sit right with me. Hope you remember
| not to take all these small frustrations too seriously in life.
| Wishing you well and sending positive vibes.
|
| (and I switched to Apple too)
| boesboes wrote:
| Thank you :) I can get overly frustrated with tech, but have
| learned to move on. Most of the time atleast haha
| psyc wrote:
| Here's mine.
|
| Fuck Spotify. Any user problem gets referred to the
| suggestion box where you'll always be told to go fuck
| yourself. That's the only attitude they know: fuck you with a
| generic smile.
|
| There's this feature that they think is neat, and nobody
| wants, where they'll switch to whatever device you pick up
| and pick up where you left off. The problem is that for many
| users, the only thing it does is persistently switch to
| whatever device you're _not_ using, including your neighbor
| 's, thereby rendering the whole app 100% unusable. And you
| can't turn it off.
|
| There's a 7-year-long thread on their support forum - the
| only recourse - going right up to the present day, of people
| begging them either make the feature optional or fix it. And
| the only response they ever give is a straight "We are not
| going to fix this."
|
| Fuck. Spotify.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Link to the thread? That description doesn't make sense to
| me.
| psyc wrote:
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Mac/Spotify-
| Connect...
|
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Turn-off-
| Spotify-Co...
|
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Connect-
| Make-S...
|
| Look how the fuckers mark the second one "Solved" for
| their decision to do dick about it. Primo customer
| service.
| jiggyjace wrote:
| Jeez all of my friends and family and I use Spotify and not
| once have we had issues like this. Luckily there are plenty
| of other streaming services to use mate
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Why would you want to torment paying customers like that?
|
| That's the problem with today's tech industry. The objective is
| not money, it's "growth and engagement".
| the_snooze wrote:
| Users are a resource to exploit, not customers to serve. Even
| if those are users are paying.
| noahtallen wrote:
| Well, the objective _is_ still money, just coming from
| another source (ads or investors who want to see engagement)
| arpanetus wrote:
| Wait, what java runtime has to do with spotify?
| karatinversion wrote:
| "Joe Rogan Experience"
| [deleted]
| Hizonner wrote:
| The author's problem is that he is under the misapprehension that
| Spotify gives a fuck about what he wants.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| The design trend of replacing dense tables with white space heavy
| lists just grinds my gears. It's in everything these days.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| "Dear product manager, can you stop creating useless widgets to
| justify your next raise?"
|
| "No."
| nightowl_games wrote:
| Spotify's UI is a case study of the negative impact of assigning
| single screens to single teams, designers and managers. There is
| no cohesive vision. The useful functionality is all obscured by
| esthetics. I am perpetually annoyed at how poor spotify is at
| it's basic purpose. They have leaned way too far into
| recommendation systems and over designed layout. 99% of the time,
| I know what I want to listen to. Spotify's UX is designed for
| people to 'browse' the app. That doesnt resonate with me, at all.
| I know what I want.
|
| My biggest gripe with spotify is it's inability to reliably
| answer the question of "what playlist or source am I currently
| listening too?". A constant flow that spotify fails to deliver on
| is this: Search for a song, play the song, then the rest of the
| album, on repeat, without shuffle. It's annoying to have to load
| multiple slow UIs to navigate from search to album, visually
| search the album's track list and play the song your after.
|
| Itunes and Windows Media Player set the standard for how media
| should be navigated and Spotify should use some of those old
| standard concepts.
|
| EDIT:
|
| Try browsing Armin Van Buuren's massive discography on Spotify.
| 12ian34 wrote:
| I am similar to you, in that most of the time I know what I
| want to listen to... but it is worth considering that your
| personal use case of Spotify might not be the same as everyone
| else's. Spotify is doing pretty well making money so my bets
| are that your use case which you say isn't served well (and I'd
| agree) is much less common than others which Spotify does cater
| better to.
| UglyToad wrote:
| I'm definitely becoming one of the tin foil hat lot but since
| the redesign I've gone from perhaps 40 hours listening per week
| to almost zero but am too lazy to cancel the subscription.
|
| By that metric I think the redesign has succeeded, I've soft
| churned but they get the subscription and pay out no royalties.
|
| Never assign to malice yadda yadda yadda... but there's no way
| such an atrocious redesign doesn't have an ulterior motive. The
| designers have done their job well it's just optimizing for
| something else.
| meristem wrote:
| I do not work for Spotify. The following are a bunch of
| educated guesses based on how 'old standard concepts' drift
| towards 'new concepts'.
|
| 1. They test their UI with their target users (assumes they
| have a handle on who pays $$$ for the service besides ad
| revenue)
|
| 2. People who just want functionality are not a high percentage
| of users or use cases
|
| 3. A good number of users/use cases value visual feedback via
| simple, larger imagery over condensed information displays
| (condensed displays are also harder to design well)
|
| 4. There are halo and competitive effects, and all apps of a
| certain class end up looking alike and imitating each other's
| visual languages and decisions, with design gradually drifting
| towards a new set of rules that become 'standard'.
| djhworld wrote:
| I might be having rose tinted spectacles but I remember when
| Spotify first launched in the UK, maybe 2010. The app was
| _screaming fast_ in comparison to iTunes at the time, and I
| think it had a similar interface to itunes as well (although
| could be misremembering) with a table-like layout [1]
|
| I really don't understand what happened between then and now,
| it was really a big deal at the time where the UI was snappy
| and playing a song was almost instantaenous. Nowadays, while
| the playback speed is still just as snappy, the UI feels much
| worse
|
| [1] https://www.cultofmac.com/102309/spotify-will-launch-in-
| the-...
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| It's no longer a native app, it was rewritten in 2015 to be
| non-native. It's the same story everywhere, they're using
| Electron (or similar) so they can maintain one codebase for
| everything written in HTML/CSS/JS.
| moolcool wrote:
| iTunes and WMP were okay, but nothing ever has topped Foobar
| 2000 IMO.
| mskullcap wrote:
| I still miss rdio. Even though I have pretty diverse tastes in
| bands and musical styles, I loved how rdio would match me up with
| other people who shared similar musical interests. I could look
| at their music collection for inspiration. I would find many new
| artists I loved this way.
| geoffeg wrote:
| Spotify is full of those UI frustrations. There have been many
| times where I've thought "Just give me 'select * from songs where
| artist = % order by listen_count'".
|
| I started slowly moving myself away from online streaming
| services for my daily listening. I ripped all my CDs (to FLAC so
| I can re-encode to whatever I want in the future) and started
| buying albums from new artists off of Bandcamp, 7digital and
| HDTracks. I've even bought a few new CDs from local record stores
| and ripped them. I still use streaming services for discovery but
| I'm moving back to blogs (Pitchfork, Stereogum, etc), aggregators
| (Anydecentmusic) and forums for more of that discovery.
| cube00 wrote:
| I really don't enjoy that they've started hiding the listen
| count now so you can no longer tell which songs are the most
| popular if you're checking out an album.
| geoffeg wrote:
| The listen count is huge for checking out new artists. Find a
| new band, try the first four or five tracks to see if they're
| a band you're interested in. At least YouTube still has view
| counts... for now.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Just want to give a shoutout to Amazon Music, who (in a good
| way?) don't care much about the customer or a great experience,
| or even about being seen as a company who cares a lot about music
| or the artists.
|
| They just shove a bunch of music into a giant search engine and
| do some easily ignorable curation.
|
| But their search works great, easy to play an album, good back
| catalog on Unlimited (I've been doing a lot of crate digging into
| the early 2000s using Wikipedia's album catgeory listings and my
| hit rate between the list and it being in Amazon is about 85%)
|
| The API sucks, playlists have weird limits, their UI is atrocious
| ... but you can hear what you like, when you like, so I'm happy.
| casey2 wrote:
| Dear Spotify users, don't.
|
| There are good reasons Spotify does what Spotify does, some of
| which have already been mentioned in this thread. Instead of
| begging and groveling for them to change, why not change your
| habits to ones more beneficial to you? Spotify has never promised
| users freedom; they are simply a front-end to their collection of
| licensed music. Spotify has all the power in the relationship
| with their users and will perpetrate abuse on their users without
| hesitation or warning.
|
| If you're on a freedom-respecting OS, I recommend either
| soulseekqt or any plain old BitTorrent client for music
| acquisition. I recommend mpd with ncmpcpp as a client for
| playing, and sending cash by mail to whoever you want. Remember,
| sharing is a virtue, not a vice.
| chrisdalke wrote:
| Spotify won't even let you view an artist's songs in order, which
| frustrates me because I like to listen to entire discographies in
| order while working. I spent one weekend building a free tool to
| generate chronological playlists for an artist -
| https://www.timelineify.com.
|
| A decent number of people use this, which I think indicates some
| clear gaps in Spotify's basic display features. Luckily the
| Spotify API is very generous with the data they expose about
| artists.
| dm270 wrote:
| I don't know if others saw the same behavior. I'm on Android. And
| I feel like I'm in some sort of a big A/B test regarding their
| app. One day, the interface changes one way, couple days later it
| changes back. Constantly some menu or behavior changes. It's
| super frustrating. Lately it seems to have stabilized, but it
| really made me feel like a guinea pig. And maybe that's my inner
| old person speaking, but most of the changes really made it
| worse. Thinking about movie streaming apps maybe that's on
| purpose to make everything require just a couple more clicks. But
| this is music streaming. Most ppl wanna turn it on and then it
| sits in your pocket.
| californical wrote:
| Yeah I switched to Tidal when I learned about Spotify's data
| sharing and privacy concerns a little over a year ago, but I
| was also so frustrated with Spotify's UI always changing in
| frustrating ways and making it worse. They'd break features
| that I used often (playlist sorting broke, for example). I'd
| contact customer support and they'd go through this whole
| "uninstall and reinstall the app, does it still happen?"
| ...YES, it's another bug for no reason! Stop breaking my shit!
|
| With Spotify, it would often be an update that looks pretty but
| was harder to use, which is the exact opposite of what I care
| about... I'm here to listen to music as fast as possible and
| get on with my life, not scroll through giant menus with way
| too much spacing, when it used to all fit on one screen.
|
| There are still usability issues with Tidal that are similar to
| Spotify (hard to find something specific, etc), but they
| basically never change anything about the core UI, it just
| always works the exact same with some minor additions
| here&there. And honestly it's reduced my frustration
| dramatically.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Tidal doesn't even let me play with it for a while to see if
| I like it to subscribe...
| gen3 wrote:
| They have an ad supported free tier now
| arpanetus wrote:
| Is Tidal's UI lightweight(like it's not Electron)? What about
| the songs? Are you satisfied with the songs library?
|
| I'm thinking about switching since native spotify app's
| playing gif (or icon) spikes my CPU usage for some very
| strange reason.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| I used Tidal for a while; it's mostly the same as Spotify
| in terms of UX. They also use Electron. The song library is
| similar.
|
| Back in the day I use Rdio, which had a pretty good UI;
| unfortunately they shut down.
| corney91 wrote:
| I gave up on my Spotify subscription of 13 years because of
| this. The interface kept changing and making it more difficult
| to use. All I want is to listen to albums and Daily Mixes, and
| keeping up with all their unrelated app changes became too
| frustrating.
|
| I've switched to Deezer which I find saner, but I fear these
| streaming companies just aren't incentivised to produce simple
| interfaces.
| wonderbore wrote:
| AB is the worst. I don't know how long it's been going on, but
| on YouTube's homepage it keeps alternating between "Hover to
| expand video and see Watch Later button" and the regular
| always-visible Watch Later button. https://imgur.com/a/70p07Ku
|
| Pick one already.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| I think you can turn off that expand-on-hover popup in the
| YouTube settings. I found it super annoying and I was
| surprised it was even an option.
| AuthConnectFail wrote:
| Weird, I actually love that feature. Especially on my
| browser if there are multiple videos on my feed that I
| wanted to watch then hated open multiple tabs for them and
| in most cases I never ended up going there or bloating the
| number of tabs open.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Oh, I use the Watch Later feature all the time, just not
| the autoplay-muted-on-hover popup.
| popcorncowboy wrote:
| This is what happens when you let "the data" drive design. The
| data becomes an abstraction between your users and your goals,
| leading to a paint by numbers exercise where the only thing
| that matters is getting some arbitrary metric to go up.
|
| The results are quite predictable: numbers that go up, and UX
| that goes way, way down. Eventually this falls over because
| your model ends up in local maxima.
| grishka wrote:
| Wait till you see how much Instagram A/B tests everything. I
| found a debug menu in it one day when reverse engineering it to
| get rid of the ads, and so enabled it as well. Among other
| things, there is a complete list of all server-side settings
| (or "quick experiments" as they call them) with the ability to
| override them. There's at least several hundred of these,
| possibly a thousand or more. It's insane. The kinds of stuff
| they're A/B testing, too -- wording, button colors, bug fixes,
| animation durations...
|
| I have no doubt Spotify is doing the same. Every large company
| does it. This practice of data-driven development is such a
| disgrace to the IT industry.
| lightbendover wrote:
| Honestly, blame humans. If our species wasn't susceptible to
| changing our behavior due to these seemingly-inconsequential
| changes, A/B testing would return to a more sane baseline;
| however, these "silly" changes (when statistically proven to
| be effective long-term) can lead to 8 figure shifts in
| megacorp revenue so they will continue to be made.
| solarkraft wrote:
| It's amazing how much thought and effort seems to go into
| Instagram's UI while it looks completely unplanned and is,
| for me, pretty unusable. Nothing makes sense. The UI is
| similarly weirdly designed to Snapchat and Discord, so maybe
| it has something to do with targeting "the kids".
|
| I don't get how people can be comfortable using that stuff at
| all.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Ig is the perfect example of an app that optimizes for
| engagement while providing a really buggy and low-quality
| experience
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I miss being able to buy music for other people.
| iambateman wrote:
| I find that the top result is the right one about 90% of the
| time, so it's not really an issue. That said, the other 10% is
| pretty irritating.
|
| Side note...I believe that all music apps are _fated_ to
| irritating mediocrity.
|
| iTunes was once perfect, and grew unusable. Spotify was perfect
| in 2019 and is trending toward usability issues as well.
| pharmakom wrote:
| When talking about the downside of Spotify, everyone focuses on
| the lack of control over the catalog. This is a real issue, with
| tracks sometimes just disappearing, but another loss of control
| is in the interface.
|
| Local audio _files_ for me, please.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| On the contrary, some releases I want only release on streaming
| services, low quality Amazon MP3 and Vinyl.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > There are so many terrible UX/UI patterns everywhere in these
| tech companies. Apple, Google, Spotify, Netflix, Microsoft,
| Amazon, etc;
|
| I 100% agree with this, and I find myself increasingly hating
| software the worse the UX is.
|
| I was in visual studio the other day, and wanted to view the
| properties of the project on the settings page, so I open it up
| trying to view it, which immediately and automatically without
| any input from me fired some sort of event off that modified the
| settings and completely broke the project.
| dusted wrote:
| I remember posting this to hn some time ago and it was well
| enough received that I'll mention it here, a self-hosted
| streaming solutions with absolutely no bells or whistles. Just a
| table of music, though, the table is generated by a search query,
| fast.
|
| https://github.com/DusteDdk/dstream
| agluszak wrote:
| My biggest problem with Spotify (and possibly the easiest to
| fix?) is that you can add songs only to a single end of the play
| queue. In Google Play Music (RIP) you had a deque. And that
| single reason is why I chose Tidal. I don't use playlists, I
| always eiter create my queue ad-hoc or listen to whole albums.
| lolski wrote:
| I second this.
|
| Also this UI / UX issue isn't just a problem with Spotify but
| iTunes (Apple Music) to! So I guess it's just a general trend
| that started for no good reason.
|
| In iTunes, the table view is now only for the main page, and has
| been gone from the search and the playlist pages. It's so
| inconsistent. You get the nice old-school table view when you're
| on default but then when on the search page they display it on
| grid view. On the playlist page, you're like on this weird half-
| table half-grid view.
| noir_lord wrote:
| I just use youtube for music.
|
| I listen to a lot of new wave retro and lesser known prog/prog
| metal and it's all on there anyway.
| Dylovell wrote:
| Been using spotify since they launched a beta in the US (11 years
| ago?), but them constantly pushing services that are not music on
| their platform, and populating their recommended playlists
| cheaper-per-play songs, I am actively looking to move.
| jordanpg wrote:
| Want to browse your favorite genre?
|
| Trying clicking Search, and then... scroll through and read 80
| tiles, one by one, until you find the one you're looking for!
|
| _You can 't sort the list._
|
| _It 's not even in alphabetical order._
|
| _The ordering of the list changes based on unknown criteria._
|
| It's comically bad UI/UX. If there was a sitcom about bad UX,
| this would be in the pilot episode.
| asplake wrote:
| While we're at it, can we just get a list of daily mixes? Seems
| completely random which of them I'll see
| zamalek wrote:
| For those wanting an alternative, do give Tidal a trial (there
| are services that can port over your playlists).
|
| Pros: You can view almost everything as a list, although their UI
| is optimized for touch screens - so the rows are rather large.
| Their radio rivals Pandora in terms of properly understanding
| your tastes.
|
| Cons: After a very quick look, I don't think they do podcasts.
| Their API support is utter shit, 3rd party clients aren't a
| possibility, and there is no Linux client. You have to use the
| their client for "master" quality (which isn't bit-perfect and is
| definitely snake oil).
|
| Having tried Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Play, Pandora, and
| Qobuz, I have found that Tidal is comfortably the best.
|
| Amazon Music is a very close second, but suffers from what I call
| the "Armin Effect". Armin van Buuren plays many genres of
| electronic music, and so inferior recommendation engines tend to
| connect this huge umbrella of genres through Armin. Your taste in
| music may not be affected by this problem. Tidal and Pandora are
| the only two services I have used that don't suffer from this.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > Cons: (...) I don't think they do podcasts.
|
| That's a big pro. Podcasts and music don't belong together.
|
| A good recommendation engine is important to me, so I'll check
| it out.
| everdrive wrote:
| >Dear Spotify, can we just get table of songs?
|
| No, you can't. This is a for-profit service, and a table of songs
| interferes with their ability to choose what you listen to, and
| prefer certain artists or songs over others. I would not expect a
| high-quality music library interface from _any_ cloud provider,
| because the intent is to stream you the things they prefer, and
| not empower you.
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| It's funny that Spotify is regarded as a talented dev shop, but
| they don't know how to seed their random number generator.
| ImaCake wrote:
| Yeah this infuriates me. I have a very large playlist and it
| will definitely keep playing the same stuff each time I shuffle
| it. It's not like is even hard to set a pseudo random seed.
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| This is a big frustration of mine, too. The other is that Spotify
| is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing
| and listening to a library of albums really painful.
|
| The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful
| enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface,
| which is actually what I recently started doing:
| https://i.imgur.com/ar7VrYy.png.
|
| It's still work in progress but actually works perfectly well
| already. It's not ready for public use yet and also isn't open
| source yet though. If you want to follow development I guess the
| best place to do that is my twitter:
| https://twitter.com/tom_j_watson.
| iamcreasy wrote:
| Looks neat. Do they have SDK to build desktop players?
| (Excluding wrapping the web SDK around Electron)
| Macha wrote:
| No, they killed the legacy API which most used recently. Also
| unless you want to pay for your own widevine license, even
| Electron is not an option.
|
| Any that still work are using librespot, which uses their
| undocumented smart device API
| ge96 wrote:
| Looks pretty nice. Is it in a browser wrapper or just on
| web/built using something else?
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| It's just a website as it depends on the web playback sdk. It
| could be wrapped into a desktop app with something like tauri
| easily enough, which is something I'm considering. Would
| always be available as a web app, though.
| henrik_w wrote:
| FWIW, I prefer playlists to albums. Way back I used to make mix
| tapes, then burn my own mixed CDs. I love the variety in a
| playlist, and I can pick just the songs I like.
| pbreit wrote:
| The dumbest Spotify UX is that it only lists 10 songs for an
| artist on the web player:
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Mobile-See-all-S...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| What if you make a playlist with the songs of an album, in
| order?
| javajosh wrote:
| _> Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and
| makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really
| painful._
|
| Does anyone else get a dystopian vibe from this statement? I
| feel like the old guy in the SF movie pulling his hair and
| exclaiming, "But what have we lost?!" We used to have vinyl,
| tapes, finally CDs, and even the ability to rip our library to
| a computer, which we could carry with us. It was naturally
| artist/album/track organized, required no internet, came with
| no tracking, centralized control, or subscription.
|
| (A year ago I bought a (now very cheap) nice CD player, a (now
| very cheap) separate amp and speakers, and a nice (somehow not
| very cheap) turntable, and it's great! I even kind of like the
| strong bias toward playing the same album multiple times - good
| music is complex, intricate, and it rewards relistening like a
| book rewards rereading. And listening the way the artist
| recorded is, IMHO, far superior to the digital dystopian DJ of
| spotify.)
| cortesoft wrote:
| You can still buy music in physical form, so nothing has been
| lost. If you like that method, you can still do it.
|
| Most people don't, however, because it is much cheaper and
| easier to stream. Clearly what we have lost is not worth the
| price to maintain what we had, or people would still be
| buying music instead of streaming.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| Enjoyment of music linked to a specific physical item seems
| incredibly shallow to me.
|
| If the music is worth listening to, the medium shouldn't
| matter at all.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Exactly! Also, if a song has parts you don't like, simply
| cut those out! I don't care what the artist intended - I
| only keep what's worthy of my attention!
| objclxt wrote:
| > Enjoyment of music linked to a specific physical item
| seems incredibly shallow to me.
|
| To a certain extent, but across the arts there's always
| artists that want to play with the format, so a changing of
| format can result in something being re-contextualised.
|
| For example, you can have [multisided vinyl][1] with hidden
| tracks, or loop a track onto itself so the record plays
| forever (like Sergeant Pepper). Neither are really possible
| with MP3 (there's a Brian Eno record that does both (the
| track bifurcates and loops at them end), so you get a
| random sample looping at the end of the LP).
|
| I am not saying this means the enjoyment of the music is
| lessened when you listen to it digitally - just that plenty
| of artists have written and produced pieces with the
| physical format at the front of their minds.
|
| [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisided_record
| sqlacid wrote:
| I'll never forget discovering the third track of Monty
| Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief, thought I'd lost
| my mind.
|
| As an Eno fan I'm not familiar with the mentioned album.
|
| King Crimson would put hidden messages printed in the
| vinyl inner track, I remember seeing "The next step is
| Discipline", which was their next album.
|
| I also miss the thriving bootleg community, picture
| discs.
| alexvoda wrote:
| I see no reason why all of that could not be done in
| software. Same as DVD menus.
|
| For the record, VLC supports DVD menus and the Matroska
| container format (mkv, mka, mks, and the basis for webm)
| supports all of the features imagined so far. I believe
| the demand for the content far outweighed the demand for
| the presentation layer.
|
| All of these forms of interactivity however didn't prove
| popular in the digital world. Think of DVD's again. How
| often would you have ripped a DVD into a 4 or 8 GiB ISO
| in order to preserve the full experience and how often
| would you have rather ripped just the video file ~400
| MiB, reencoded using a modern codec. Netflix optimises
| for the latter.
|
| If you allow for programability, all features of music
| albums and more can be recreated.
|
| What people want is no fuss instant access to the popular
| music of the moment therefore we have streaming services
| with good enough quality for most people and vast enough
| but incomplete collections of music. All while navigating
| the maze of licensing internationally.
|
| How many listeners do you believe would rather open
| Spotify/iTunes/WinAmp and press play to hear music and
| how many would rather navigate a album specific
| experience.
|
| If experience is so important, it can still be done in
| the streaming focused world of today (without
| standardised formats like Matroska). Just package it as
| an app (native or web), publish it on the app stores and
| let the app store take a 30% cut. Apps do not appear to
| be a popular format for music albums or for movies, even
| though they were attempted.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Why should the medium not matter? I actually feel that's
| the shallow take
|
| Quite often, historically, music comes as part of a
| complete experiential package. Gatherings around fire,
| singing and dancing in groups, celebrating life's
| milestones, getting dressed up for concerts, excitement at
| buying tickets, journeying in and out of the city to pick
| up new recordings.
|
| All of those things are valid aspects of musical culture
| for me. Stripping the meta musical aspects from the musical
| experience is inherently lossy and in some ways diminishes
| the full spectrum of what music can be.
|
| This is especially true for music that was created outside
| of and/or before the streaming milieu.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Weren't those things stripped from music when we invented
| recording?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| butwhywhyoh wrote:
| I suppose then you're a proponent of photographing all
| famous works of art and displaying them on a webpage
| somewhere, because if the painting is worth looking at, the
| medium shouldn't matter at all, right?
|
| I guess going to a museum to view artwork is an incredibly
| shallow experience for you?
| daveoc64 wrote:
| Album art etc. is supplementary to the music - I don't
| need to see it on a square piece of cardboard to
| "appreciate" it.
|
| An original artwork is just that - best when the original
| is viewed. A CD, Tape, or Vinyl is in no way "the
| original".
| blep_ wrote:
| I'm not that person, but... yes, unironically.
|
| Maybe different people value different things?
| im3w1l wrote:
| Yes I get a dystopic vibe, but for an entirely different
| reason. As for what we lost, I would say a gradual loss of
| the social element. Music used to be something that everyone
| did. Then become something that musicians did and other
| people listened to, but at least you got to see them perform
| and create a shared experience. Then we started recording
| music so you could listen to it at home, but there was still
| the social element of listening to the same music and sharing
| recommendations and forming subcultures based on listening to
| the same music. Now with dj spotify you don't even need to
| discuss music with other people.
|
| Now don't get me wrong, of course there are still lots of
| people doing music for the fun of it, people still go to live
| performances, people still share recommendations. So it isn't
| fully lost by any means, just a question of degrees.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Honestly I like physical media because manipulating them is
| pleasurable especially vinyl but the issue with playlist is
| only a Spotify UX issue. Apple Music doesn't have it. YouTube
| Music doesn't have it.
|
| It's just that Spotify has decided that the way to optimise
| revenue is to focus on being an exclusive provider of some
| original contents in the form of podcasts and has slowly
| started making the listening music side of the application
| worse and worse since.
| gilbetron wrote:
| The physicality of cassettes/records/CDs/mini-disks was fun,
| and listening to an entire album sometimes was really cool -
| but almost entirely not. Most albums were padded with crap to
| fill it up so people didn't feel ripped off. Remember, an
| album in 1985 cost $40 in 2022 dollars. Sure, there were
| occasional albums that the artist really thought about,
| including the slipcase, and the physicality of that I miss.
| But you can still great albums and listen to them in their
| entirety. Revisiting that nostalgia in 2022 recently, and
| I've found the joy from an album isn't really what it used to
| be - mostly because we aren't trapped anymore.
|
| Want to listen to albums? Stop using Spotify. I honestly
| don't get why people choose that one. Youtube music blows it
| out of the water, and you can get ad-free youtube with it as
| well, and share all of it with your "family". Plus it has
| whole albums as one of the options when you search for
| artist/song.
| allturtles wrote:
| > Most albums were padded with crap to fill it up so people
| didn't feel ripped off.
|
| This may be true, but you could always just buy the good
| albums. I owned a number of CDs/cassettes back in the day
| and I would listen to them and enjoy them front-to-back,
| over and over.
|
| Another aspect of it is that very often what's familiar
| sounds good, so by listening to the whole album, all of it
| (or more of it) would start to sound good, not just the
| radio tracks you were already familiar with.
|
| Finally, there are tracks on some albums that may seem odd,
| or not even particularly musical out of context, but still
| add to the overall experience (e.g. "Fitter, Happier" on
| _OK Computer_ , or the instrumental filler tracks on _Ill
| Communication_ ).
| gilbetron wrote:
| I 100% agree about the different experience of listening
| to good/great/amazing albums and the benefits of doing
| so. It's just that it is a pretty rare experience,
| particularly these days! A definite downside of our
| current music situation is that making an album like that
| is something that is really exceptional, since people
| rarely listen to music in that manner anymore. However, I
| wonder if the total number of "holistic" albums are
| greater now, just because there is far more music being
| made? :thinking-emoji:
|
| I wore out my Synchronicity tape back in the 80s :)
| Listened to the album randomly a couple of months ago and
| it is spooky how the experience re-asserted itself into
| my being. I just know every nook and cranny of the album.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> I 100% agree about the different experience of
| listening to good/great/amazing albums and the benefits
| of doing so. It's just that it is a pretty rare
| experience, particularly these days!_
|
| Yes - I suspect many kids who are happy with Spotify
| haven't had the experience. (It's actually a similar
| trade-off with broadcast TV - I'm realizing now with kids
| the downsides to having on-demand every episode of every
| show ever made, versus having to _wait until next week_
| and having to be there at a particular time. Gives you
| time to digest, anticipate, and enjoy. And I always muted
| the ad breaks, which made them tolerable.)
| javajosh wrote:
| _> Revisiting that nostalgia in 2022 recently, and I've
| found the joy from an album isn't really what it used to
| be_
|
| Maybe you haven't found the right albums? You should listen
| to St. Vincent's first 3 albums - they are really good.
| More recently, Emma Ruth Rundle "On Dark Horses" is
| fantastic, or anything by Lisa Hannigan. Recording artists
| are more and more aware that people are not consuming
| albums in one sitting, but that's still how music is
| produced! Vinyl is one reason but another, I think, is that
| "album" is the most useful abstraction for the artist to
| think in when it comes to making a thing.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Want to listen to albums? Stop using Spotify. I honestly
| don't get why people choose that one. Youtube music blows
| it out of the water, and you can get ad-free youtube with
| it as well
|
| For me at this point it's mostly porting. I have a ton of
| playlist and some are quite large and it would horribly
| tedious to port over by hand.
|
| I've tried some automated tools in the past, but YouTube
| doesn't always have correct of necessary title/artist
| metadata and there were a lot of bad matches.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Turntables are not cheap because of the vinyl revival, so
| they are trendy, hence expensive.
|
| Nobody wants CD players :(
| rosseloh wrote:
| I like CDs. I just don't listen to music on physical media
| enough to really justify having a dedicated setup anymore.
|
| My boss, on the other hand, collects the damn things. He's
| got an entire large bookshelf filled with vintage CD
| players...
|
| To me, vinyl is a collectible, or at least, a way to show
| "yes I appreciate this music and want to show off that I
| enjoy it". If I like an artist/album enough, I'll buy the
| vinyl if I can. But it usually just sits on the shelf
| looking pretty. I got lucky and my player (nothing special
| but it works so long as you have a good cartridge) was from
| my dad. When I actually listen to said album, it's usually
| on my phone over bluetooth (earbuds or in the car), or even
| if I'm listening on the "hi fi" it's streaming.
|
| Not to say that I never play albums on the turntable, it's
| just not that often.
| patentatt wrote:
| > vintage CD players
|
| Now I feel old. I remember the first time I saw and heard
| a Compact Disc. It was a rainbow colored object straight
| from the future. It was magical, the whole family
| gathered around the little boom box like thing playing
| some classical music CD.
|
| Also, I hope your boss doesn't actually _listen_ to any
| CD player built before about the mid 00 's or so. Maybe
| mid-90s if you're talking mega-bucks (at the time) like a
| Mark Levinson or Theta Digital. But advances in DACs in
| the last ~20 years made everything prior very obsolete.
| Nowadays you can get commodity chips in the single digit
| dollar range that are for all intents and purposes
| faultless.
| javajosh wrote:
| I know! CDs are such a great format, and as long as the ink
| doesn't corrode the aluminum layer, they can last a very
| long time. They are more compact than vinyl, they don't
| suffer from lots of vinyl's error modes but they still have
| things like liner notes. Plus they represent an album at a
| theoretical maximum of fidelity and reproducibility. What's
| not to like?
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Physical storage space. ;)
|
| My laptop is smaller than any collection of CDs and can
| store an entire building of them in the space of 12 jewel
| cases.
|
| If you include my phone and a cellular connection for
| streaming, the entire world of music can be accessed in a
| device smaller than any portable CD player. And the
| speakers in my iPhone are better than most stereos from
| the same era.
|
| We truly live in the world where science fiction has
| become reality. :D
| ddingus wrote:
| The speakers...
|
| A while back, my wife and I went for a week way out in
| the sticks. We live in Oregon, and our favorite place is
| out in the Ochoco high desert National Forest. And
| nothing works there. I mean nothing except for AM radio
| late at night.[1]
|
| After a few days, our hearing settles back to what is
| supposed to be normal. City life is loud and our hearing
| system compensates in various ways that reduce our
| ability to really appreciate sound.
|
| After hearing that our ability to listen has relaxed into
| high potential mode, we decided to get the MacBook out
| and watch a movie. We had been saving this experience for
| a good time and it all came together nicely!
|
| We were blown away![0]
|
| Seriously. The amount and quality, fidelity of sound
| coming out of that MacBook was insane! Of course it all
| was soft on the low end. Not too much we could do about
| that because physics, but otherwise the whole experience
| was a real treat!
|
| I find it difficult to communicate the impact. Here we
| are, gentle noises from our camp fire a modest distance
| away, various crackles, pops, hisses and an equally
| gentle breeze and our own bodies were the only sounds
| present outside of the movie sound track.
|
| Mixed in nicely with all that was our movie. Actually a
| couple of them because we repeated the experience a
| couple times. It was so damn good!
|
| All I can really say here is you should definitely give
| this a try!
|
| So much engineering, better materials, better software,
| and it all adds right the fuck up. I really did not
| expect what I heard at all. Very highly recommended.
|
| ------
|
| [0] And to be clear, I am talking about all that we did
| hear when we did not expect to. Truth is, we were camping
| with a MacBook. The sound we heard wea respectable,
| despite it being small speakers and all that goes mobile
| devices.
|
| It seemed sci-fi like to us. The tech advances,
| engineering all add up. And that's the blown away part.
| Experiencing a sum like that, rather than incrementally.
| The context really helped raise the impact.
|
| [1] And that is a great experience! Any radio will be
| fun, but if you can get hold of a 70's maybe 80's era one
| with multiple frequency bands, say short wave, broadcast,
| and any others, the isolation means getting to connect to
| the world old school tuning stuff in from all over the
| place!
|
| AM, on a good radio, is an interesting experience and
| again on a good radio optimized for what the tech
| actually does, will sound better than you think. And how
| it colors the material is something I crave. Comes from
| growing up listening to a fine Zenith "Trans Oceanic"
| radio with almost god like performance, but I digress...
| javajosh wrote:
| Great story. Sounds like nights at Joshua Tree, where I
| am more familiar. Apple's laptop speakers are the best in
| the world. But even the best laptop speakers aren't "good
| hifi system good", especially in bass and stereo
| separation, but these qualities are not needed by lots of
| music. Even cheap modern portables with li-ion batteries
| and rare-earth magnets are startlingly good, a real feat
| of engineering, and perfectly acceptable to blast Pharrel
| at a pool party. But if I'm listening to Dark Side of the
| Moon, I want good headphones!
| ddingus wrote:
| I agree with you, though I also love a room with properly
| placed and tuned loudspeakers.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| 100% agree. I got a new MBP in 2020 and its sound is
| shockingly good. I had never experienced decent sound
| from laptop speakers before.
| ddingus wrote:
| Nothing like those speakers, agreed.
|
| In a more normal office setting, I am far more inclined
| to use the built in speaker and mic combo myself when
| using my Apple device.
|
| Otherwise, my goto is actually the Samsung AKG pack in
| earbuds that came with my Note phones. Mic is great,
| audio quality also great. Those have a wire.
|
| I do not mind a wire. Always works.
| somebehemoth wrote:
| > And the speakers in my iPhone are better than most
| stereos from the same era.
|
| Did you live in this era? I don't think you know what you
| are talking about.
| saltcured wrote:
| Right, I think people have no idea that home hifi
| speakers and amps even in the 1960s could sound
| essentially as good as today when fed with a good source.
| However that does not mean that one of those systems
| found in estate sale will sound ok today. The materials
| degrade and sound nothing today like they did when sold.
|
| I remember my dad's mid-60s KLH speakers sounding good
| with a mid-70s Sansui solid state receiver in the early
| 80s, before one of the tweeters fried and the paper
| woofer cones really deteriorated.
|
| I remember how beautiful his early 60s Citation tube amp
| sounded in the early 90s, after we rebuilt it with new
| electrolytic capacitors and tubes, hooked it up to
| mid-80s Infinity bookshelf speakers, and drove it with a
| Sony CD player that had a built-in volume control for its
| line-out. That amp was based on a video amplifier circuit
| design and so had decent characteristics not just past
| audible but nearly into MHz (if it weren't for the low-
| pass filtering effects of the final transformers and
| speakers).
|
| I remember how those same Infinity speakers, despite poly
| woofer cones, also degraded by the mid-90s due to the
| endemic fungal rot that took all the foam speaker
| surrounds of that era. A power spike or transport damage
| also killed one of the tweeter coils. I lived for a while
| overseas and found an affordable shop where a guy hand
| rebuilt these speakers for me, replacing the rotten
| woofer surrounds with contemporary butyl rubber and
| rewinding the tweeter coil. They sounded just like new
| again, and I was happy to confirm that my ears were not
| to blame. I left those behind after another move, so
| cannot report on their longevity.
|
| It amuses me to think that my "new" hifi setup is almost
| 15 years old now, with tower speakers and a class D
| Yamaha receiver that I use as the DAC whether driven by
| HDMI or TOSlink from a USB audio peripheral. Just like my
| earlier hifi setups, the limiting factor is room
| acoustics and practical matters like not upsetting nearby
| cohabitants or neighbors. I continue to be somewhat
| boggled by the atrocious sound people are willing to
| inflict on themselves with phone, computer, or little
| bluetooth speakers that don't even sound as good as an
| early 80s "ghetto blaster".
| javajosh wrote:
| _> class D Yamaha receiver that I use as the DAC whether
| driven by HDMI or TOSlink from a USB audio periphera_
|
| I'm sorry to say I wimped out and, despite the low price
| and power efficiency, didn't try one of these, and opted
| for an older power hungry design. What did you get? I
| actually have an extra pair of the B&W speakers I got for
| my main system and was thinking of using them for the TV,
| but I don't want another clunky amp out there.
| saltcured wrote:
| I might have been too casual with jargon here... I used
| class D as a name for modern IC switching designs in
| place of the old class A or class AB designs that
| traditionally provided decent fidelity. I guess there are
| really quite a few classes here now and I don't really
| know which I have.
|
| I bought a rather mid-level Yamaha home theater receiver
| with Dolby and DTS decoding back in the late 2000s, It is
| labeled as an HTR-6140 and must be discontinued for many
| years by now. It has a bunch of DSP scenes/modes. Other
| than wanting surround decoding and HDMI + TOSlink inputs,
| I did not geek out on specs. I merely assume it is class
| D because the whole receiver is pretty light, so no big
| heat sinks, and it doesn't seem to produce much waste
| heat compared to older receivers I've used.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Tapes seem to have made a comeback in certain Punk/Rap
| scenes, but a lot of it seems mostly aesthetic/an attempt
| to replicate some period l (see Memphis phonk: where home
| recorded tapes were a cornerstone of the genre and have had
| a bit of a revival in the last years)
| m1gu3l wrote:
| > "But what have we lost?!"
|
| make a comment or thread about spotify/pandora/tidal and sit
| back and wait to see how long it takes for some "audiophile"
| to come along and to admonish you and tell you a story about
| their setup and music appreciation "workflow" and how it is
| better and somehow more correct.
|
| we lost nothing. it is all still here. and, apparently, the
| added bonus of droves of sweaty people telling you you're
| doing it wrong. life is grand.
| javajosh wrote:
| You might reasonably call me a Luddite, but an audiophile?
| Not in the sense you mean. I don't claim I can hear
| expensive speaker cables (I got mine at Home Depot btw).
| Great gear from the 90's and 00's is available cheap, and
| it's great. It has _buttons_. And I don 't have to pay
| someone to continue accessing my music and I can listen to
| music in an album centric way.
|
| Nor am I claiming I'm more correct (although I guess I'm
| pretty proud of having found a somewhat contrarian path to
| take the trade-offs I think matter most.) You want to
| listen to spotify on your phone and bt headphones - all of
| which is subject to decay, decay of money, battery,
| connectivity - meanwhile I'll listen to my library with
| wired components that run smoothly and no latency without
| drops or a monthly bill. You get all-in-one go anywhere
| convenience, I get old school tactile control. Neither of
| us is doing it wrong. But yeah, I like mine better which is
| why I do it that way (and I assume the same is true for
| you, unless you're a masochist, and if so I say great,
| keeping doing you.)
| crtasm wrote:
| > we lost nothing. it is all still here.
|
| if you ignore the massive amount of music that hasn't been
| - or often cannot be - released on streaming services,
| maybe?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Looks like we lost the ability to go through a list of
| songs from an album, episodes from a podcast, or podcasts
| from a collection, which is the subject of TFA.
| sosull wrote:
| Slightly beside the point, but it is a problem that just
| doesn't afflict Apple Music: those folks seem totally
| happy to make the kind of software that plays albums in
| sequence. The true surprise is that a century-old
| function has become a differentiating feature.
| frogstomp19 wrote:
| I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. In the streaming
| era, it's easier than ever before to discover new artists and
| listen to an unprecedented variety of music with minimal
| investment. If it's slightly cumbersome to listen to albums
| on Spotify, it's still much less cumbersome that going to a
| store to buy a CD or purchasing online and waiting for it to
| arrive + keeping your collection physically organized and in
| good condition. I don't absolutely love Spotify but I'm not
| going back to a CD collection.
| mongol wrote:
| Many people bring up the "discover new music" argument. It
| is probably subjective, but for me this has never been an
| issue. There are so many way to discover new music today,
| there are tons on youtube and people recommend in the
| comments, you see a mention of something and head over to
| Wikipedia, follow some links, and so on. I don't need an
| algorithm for it, an algorithm that most likely is more
| optimized for revenue than anything else.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > there are tons on youtube and people recommend in the
| comments
|
| I mean if Spotify UX is bad, YouTube is absolutely trash.
| I have to pay to be able to stream media if my phone is
| locked.
| mongol wrote:
| There are apps that work around this. I use NewPipe. No
| matter how bad the Youtube app is there is plenty of
| music to find there
| javajosh wrote:
| I almost always listen to YT on my desktop, connected to
| the stereo. And on Firefox with extensions to help with
| the rest.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Streaming has sacrificed so much at the altar of
| "discovery". Sometimes you want discovery and sometimes
| you don't. More and more, I'm finding I don't care about
| discovery and just want to listen to my music. If it's a
| choice between my old late-2000s era iPod loaded with my
| carefully curated list of albums and streaming services
| which are optimized for "discovery" and "engagement" and
| require the network to be online, I pick the iPod any day
| of the week.
|
| Other people like streaming, and want The Algorithm to
| feed them discovery, and that's fine--it's just not for
| me.
| anticristi wrote:
| > an algorithm that most likely is more optimized for
| revenue than anything else.
|
| Yup, that is the core issue. We have all this great tech,
| but then deploy it against ourselves. The peak is when FB
| optimized for polarized (ahem fake) content, because that
| is what drives "engagement".
|
| I'm not sure what is the solution here. Regulations
| around more algorithmic transparency? "Low tech"
| alternatives? User education?
| HeadsUpHigh wrote:
| My results from discovering new artists have been far
| superior on community oriented places vs spotify or any
| streaming service. Algos just suck at this.
| frogstomp19 wrote:
| I'm not really arguing that Spotify has the greatest
| music discover system but if you read about an album, it
| costs you nothing to try it out. Prior to subscription
| services and digital music it would be a 10$ investment
| that you may or may not make.
| watwut wrote:
| It is not actually easier. It is theoretically more
| available. Practically, current tech is designed to keep
| you in one bubble and makes it harder to step put of it.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _it 's easier than ever before to discover new artists_
|
| Not really.
|
| It's easier than ever to be exposed to a select group of
| pre-selected songs by a small subset of artists churned out
| by a computer program for the purpose of getting you to
| continue your subscription. That's not discovery.
|
| Go into any real music store, like Louisiana Music Factory
| in New Orleans, Amoeba Music in Los Angeles, or Electric
| Fetus in Minneapolis, and you'll find thousands of albums
| and artists that are not on streaming, never have been on
| streaming, and never will be on streaming.
|
| The tech companies have made people believe that they're
| seeing everything, but they're not. They're just looking
| through a keyhole into the world of music.
|
| For example, Apple boasts something like 90 million songs
| on Apple Music. The reality check is that's probably less
| than 1% of the world's recorded music.
|
| People on HN rail against "walled gardens" in app stores,
| and then wall themselves into one streaming service or the
| other because they bought the infinite music hype, and
| don't even know it.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> I feel like we've lost essentially nothing._
|
| We've lost: cover art, liner notes, the ability to share or
| sell your music without 3rd party permission, music stores,
| and in many cases local music scenes that formed around
| music stores. Bret Victor has been harping on this for
| years, but we've also lost a great deal of tactility -
| putting a CD in a player and pressing buttons to play it
| uses your hands in pleasant ways that screens just aren't.
|
| As for discovery, the promise is greater than reality. I
| used Spotify for a while specifically for this purpose, but
| I didn't discover a single new artist through it. YouTube,
| by contrast, has introduced me to new artists, as have a
| few radio stations like KCRW and KQED (who both have
| excellent YT channels too). And you know what? Music
| discovery is a different _mode of listening_ than enjoying
| my library and ne 'er the twain shall meet, IMHO.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Man I used to put CDs in players all day long, I don't
| miss it a single bit. I was one of the first MP3 player
| adopters and never looked back. I also used tapes. Was
| happy to ditch those for CDs too. Never used vinyl
| though. Maybe I would have liked that more than tapes and
| CDs. Seems plausible enough, but then again maybe not.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > I didn't discover a single new artist through it.
|
| That's surprising. I've never used Spotify for this, but
| 10+ years ago used Pandora for that purpose. I was
| overjoyed with the new artists I learned about.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| It's not surprising to me that someone who very clearly
| hates Spotify for ideological reasons doesn't have a good
| experience when using it.
|
| Spotify is amazing for discovery, they're holding it
| wrong.
| javajosh wrote:
| _someone who very clearly hates Spotify for ideological
| reasons_
|
| Why would you say that? It's a pretty harsh dig, and it's
| not justified. I tried Spotify and didn't like it. I
| never said I hated it. I don't like it because I weight
| its trade-offs differently than you. I mean, have YOU
| tried the alternative I've suggested? If not, is it
| because of your ideology?
| so_dewy wrote:
| >We've lost: cover art
|
| Spotify does have cover art for albums, at least for me
| it does.
|
| > Music discovery is a different mode of listening
|
| For me it really is the same mode. I regularly discover
| new artists when my handcrafted playlists finish playing
| and it starts to play music based on the playlist I just
| listened to
| mariusor wrote:
| > Spotify does have cover art for albums, at least for me
| it does.
|
| I think parent means something like this:
| https://www.encartespop.com.br/2012/09/encarte-pink-
| floyd-da...
|
| The vinyl and especially CD covers were sometimes a
| little more than just barren images.
| dendriti wrote:
| As someone with mobility impairment, putting a CD in a
| player and pressing buttons to play was never pleasant.
| In fact I was often stuck with whatever five CDs were
| left in the player. CDs actually haven't gone away, and
| you can still use them today. I am glad the world has
| moved on though.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically
| every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly
| on an ultrapowerful mobile computing device that fits
| comfortably in my pocket. Place yourself in about 1997 and
| savor that statement for a moment. But what have we gained?
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Yeah but I don't care about 99.9% of that, and a lot of
| that other 0.1% isn't even on Spotify.
|
| You could say the same thing about an all-you-can-eat
| buffet. You won't end up eating the whole restaurant, and
| if you do they'll kick you out.
|
| "Basically every song ever recorded" is a red herring to
| strip you of ownership of your media.
|
| To say nothing of all the playlists I've made that have
| holes blown in them like swiss cheese because the streaming
| rights got revoked. What if Spotify turns the way of
| Netflix?
| caymanjim wrote:
| And what do people do with this power? Listen on shitty
| tinny phone speakers or comically bad earbuds. Give me back
| my glorious 80s stereo.
| criley2 wrote:
| Audio quality was garbage then too. We have rose-tinted
| memories of people with hundreds-then thousands-now worth
| of audio equipment. The average tin can radio in a car or
| in your house in the 80s was so comically bad compared to
| now that you'd think it was anachronistically bad.
| Frankly phones sound better than those cars LOL
|
| For the same money as your glorious 80s stereo, adjusted
| up, you can still get glorious audio today.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Audio quality was garbage then too._
|
| Not as bad as you might suppose.
|
| My wife has a 1983 Panasonic turntable/radio/cassette
| player that she uses sometimes. We're talking about low
| build quality, hot pink, designed for the bedroom of a
| 12-year-old girl who will listen while simultaneously
| squeeing on a three-way call on a Garfield phone. It's
| not bad. Neither of us have perfect hearing, and are far
| from audiophiles.
|
| The key is the right media for the right device.
|
| When she's playing brand new, 180-gram, super-hipster
| vinyl, her expensive modern gear in the living room is
| where it sounds best.
|
| But when she's playing a 1983 copy of Girls Just Want To
| Have Fun, it sounds best on the pink Panasonic. Pretty
| much any record made before 2000 sounds better on the
| period-correct turntable, compared with the high-end
| player, and vice-versa.
|
| She will only listen to cassettes -- new or old -- on the
| 1983 machine, even though she has a Panasonic cassette
| boom box that she bought in Japan in 2019. The old gear
| just sounds better.
|
| More and more she's been finding music on Apple Music
| during her lunch hour, then buying the vinyl or cassette
| to listen to the music at home. Again, she's not an
| audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but she
| finds the sound of analog much more pleasant. To me, it's
| pretty close, but less "sterile," for lack of a better
| word.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| You'll be hard pressed to buy comically bad earbud
| nowadays. In terms of fidelity and price, average earbuds
| beat an average 80s stereo so hard, it's not even funny.
| darkwater wrote:
| Err, no? I have a pair of cheap airpod imitation, best
| selling on Amazon with 4 stars (and reviews looked REAL),
| and they suck so hard that I had better quality with my
| walkman copy with its earbuds in 1988.
| javajosh wrote:
| Um, what? I mean, sure wired $15 earbuds exist that sound
| amazing, but their existence does NOT preclude the
| existence of terrible earbuds, especially of the BT
| variety.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Listen on shitty tinny phone speakers
|
| It's crazy how bad these are, they manage to ruin a lot
| of great songs.
| superjan wrote:
| The dystopian part is that all of the modern centralized
| services tend to evolve in spying and manipulating wannabe
| monopolists.
| mahogany wrote:
| > I can access basically every song ever recorded
|
| Not really, there is a _lot_ missing from Spotify, and not
| just obscure music. And you have to accept the fact that
| music may (and does) go missing at any time.
|
| Plus, even for songs that are on the platform, you are
| forced to listen to what version they have, which is almost
| always a "remastered" version. Example: early Beatles songs
| have vocals hard-panned to one side, which sounds terrible
| on headphones. It sounds way better on the original mono
| version.
|
| Spotify is a mediocre experience at best for music nerds,
| which is probably what the person you're responding to is
| (has an amp and speakers, vinyl, etc).
| myself248 wrote:
| Worse is that the missing stuff is constantly shifting.
| I'll add a whole album (worth of songs) to a playlist,
| and a few months later one of them is grayed out but the
| rest still work.
|
| The Spotify forums seem to suggest this is because
| someone licensed that one song differently and conditions
| have changed, so I'm no longer entitled to play it.
|
| That seems bonkers to me, but regardless of the reason,
| the effect is infuriating.
|
| I ditched Spotify a while back and I'm slowly clawing my
| way back into physical CDs, ripping and encoding (or not
| even bothering to encode; storing as plain WAV still
| doesn't take that much space given modern hard drives),
| and trying to ensure that songs don't vanish out from
| under me ever again.
| dendriti wrote:
| How does this work for you then:
|
| Spotify allows the vast majority of music listeners far
| more access to far more music than ever in history.
| mahogany wrote:
| Yeah, you're right in that sense. Honestly my post is a
| little over-dramatic because I'm venting based on these
| experiences I've had with Spotify. Overall, it does offer
| a lot and I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it.
| mftb wrote:
| Poorly. Quantity may be a quality all it's own, but that
| quality is poor. There is a lot of music that is not on
| Spotify, while other music is there but only inferior
| versions.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Youtube does for the rest of us
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| That's very true but so is Sturgeon's law.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
| antihero wrote:
| I've found the combination of Apple Music and a nice
| script to quickly import stuff from bandcamp to navidrome
| has all my needs met. Music discovery? Talking to people
| and going to gigs has me covered.
|
| Anything I like I can easily access in ALAC on any device
| from anywhere in the world.
| lowercased wrote:
| > Example: early Beatles songs have vocals hard-panned to
| one side, which sounds terrible on headphones. It sounds
| way better on the original mono version.
|
| Somewhat agreed, although I suspect that may be more of
| an Apple/Beatles decision as to what versions to make
| available. Having 3-4 versions of each song may create
| more confusion for people. But... it's a shame that many
| of those versions aren't available (original mono,
| original stereo, remastered mono, remastered stereo,
| etc). I _do_ see that Apple Music has some more options
| (US box set, for example), but even then, those are the
| US stereo /mono, and the UK mono/stereo mixes are, in
| some/many cases, different.
| mrandish wrote:
| > I can access basically every song ever recorded at the
| click of a button
|
| Yes, but the OP's point is that it's not really at the
| "click of a button" because the search appears designed
| specifically to make it easy to find playlists of songs but
| not individual songs (likely for royalty reduction
| reasons).
|
| When I was a kid, I naively imagined when I was in my 50s,
| as I am now, we'd be much closer to many of the visions of
| future painted in media from Popular Mechanics magazine to
| science fiction. Today, I understand and accept why we
| don't have the proverbial "flying cars", but I am
| disappointed when stuff we already recently _had_ (and
| could easily still have) is unavailable for bad reasons. As
| a technologist, I find this especially frustrating.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Dystopia is when I have to use electron and a slightly
| inconvenient UI. HN users must have pretty comfy lives.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| isn't that.. exactly what a dystopia is? The archetypical
| dystopia is superficially utopian, often driven by tech
| progress and excess of comfort. They're not torturing
| people in cages in Brave New World, they're giving them
| too much Soma
| breakfastduck wrote:
| People tend to get confused between a dystopia and a post
| apocalyptic wasteland
| behnamoh wrote:
| well, most are earning hundreds of $1000 a year, so their
| expectations and concerns must be different
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> most are earning hundreds of $1000 a year_
|
| Is that really the case? Anecdotally I'm earning 50k in
| EU.
| [deleted]
| bbkane wrote:
| There's a previous post/survey about where HN readers are
| located. A large amount are in California (me included).
| The Bay Area in particular does pay > $100k for most tech
| jobs. That said, taxes are so high and real estate here
| is so expensive that it's really hard to get a place you
| own.
| javajosh wrote:
| You're right, baby scifi Josh wanted this, got it, and
| somehow, violating all expectations, it sucked. It happens.
| mindslight wrote:
| The difference is who controls the software, and
| ultimately what their incentives are. Back then, you
| imagined the software serving you - details you hadn't
| thought of were to be be fleshed out in a way that made
| sense to you, to serve your interests.
|
| Now it's like our old dreams in name only. It hits all
| the bullet points, but the functionality is all wrong
| because companies want to make users the dataset rather
| than operators in control. And while one of their
| incentives is user satisfaction, it's competing with
| engagement, revenue side channels, price discrimination,
| etc.
| fivre wrote:
| The media of the day have always had an outsize influence on
| the format of music. The modern album _exists_ because LPs
| became available, and the format just kinda persisted because
| the media after were also limited to a particular length.
| We're used to this, but we just happened to be born well
| after the point where listening to music required hiring a
| chamber orchestra, and the music listened to was designed for
| that format.
|
| I don't like the playlist (and now, TikTok)-driven market--I
| too prefer listening to a full album straight through--but
| there's not really anything more inherently musical about the
| formats that came before. For better or worse, that's just
| the nature of the industry.
| stoicjumbotron wrote:
| Woah! Is it similar to Reddit's API with no limit whatsoever
| and do whatever you want with it?
| srrr wrote:
| 15 years ago when I worked in the music streaming space we also
| had to push users to playlists instead of albums. The reason,
| in Germany at least, was that a playlist only payed 1/10 the
| royalties to the GEMA [1] than an album playthrough. Playlists
| were classified as "radio" and thus a performance of the radio
| station but an album was the performance of the original
| artist.
|
| Our interface was optimized for low royalties, not the end
| user. Maybe it is the same situation now.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEMA_(German_organization)
| kzrdude wrote:
| On Spotify the reason is similar but structurally different.
| With algorithmic playlists they can tinker with the mix of
| songs - they can choose what the average royalty payout
| should be as a target variable for the song mix, so that both
| more expensive and cheaper songs are used.
| anticristi wrote:
| Thanks for highlighting this!
|
| I was getting the feeling that search has become increasingly
| crappier. Not just Spotify, but also in other places like
| Google, Facebook and DuckDuckGo. Search for anything and
| you'll get something "pausibly deniability" close to what you
| typed, but optimized for metrics that are way beyond the
| user's comprehension.
|
| I feel like singling out Facebook, the worst offender: Their
| search is optimized for "engagement", i.e., distracting you
| from what you originally looked for, without you immediately
| realizing it.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Hah, I searched "cam" in the windows search bar the other
| day looking to open the camera app, but windows decided I
| was actually looking for "Calculator" or a handful of other
| things that didn't have a single "M" in it listed ahead of
| the actual camera app.
| myself248 wrote:
| Getting a bit off-topic here but YES, this drives me
| bonkers.
|
| Worse yet is that if I pause there for a moment, the
| search results continue to reorganize themselves, so that
| by the time I'm ready with a screenshot, the wrong answer
| has vanished. I can only catch it on video.
|
| How did search turn so terrible?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _How did search turn so terrible?_
|
| Not enough people complained, and/or voted with their
| dollars and/or attention.
|
| The few people who do complain are inevitably answered
| with the ever-present refrain of the Windows fan club
| ("You just don't like change!"), which effectively cuts
| off any avenues for argument in favor of the perfectly-
| good status quo. The only way forward from that point is
| down.
| mlazos wrote:
| This has been the absolute biggest surprise from me
| switching to MacOS after years in windows land. I can hit
| enter on my spotlight search results _before_ they're
| rendered and be confident. I don't event need cmd+tab
| anymore. MS on the other hand STILL doesn't have a search
| right, and they have a search engine. FYI this was a
| running joke at MS when I worked there, there is no
| search in any MS product that is functional. If you're
| lucky you'll get exact string matching, sometimes not
| even that?
| adriand wrote:
| A related issue is when autocorrect "corrects" things
| that I've spelled correctly, which drives me absolutely
| nuts. The other day I was texting someone about music and
| I wrote "melodies" which was "corrected" to "Melodie's".
| In fact on iOS this is still happening as I write this!
| mistermann wrote:
| > I was getting the feeling that search has become
| increasingly crappier.
|
| Whether that is a consequence of it becoming harder, or by
| design is the important question. I can think of a few
| reasons an uninformed or misinformed general public would
| benefit some people.
| OCISLY wrote:
| YouTube not even try to hide fact it presents search
| reasults that are completly not relevant to user query.
| wjamesg wrote:
| I've long suspected this for Amazon Music
| nine_k wrote:
| It would be great to be able to buy an album, pay the upfront
| cost, and then stream it for free.
|
| This is how Bandcamp works. I greatly prefer it to Spotify,
| but only because I'm not generally interested in mainstream
| bands.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| Same, I love Bandcamp, and I am truly worried that Epic
| will find a way to ruin it. It is one of the last places on
| the internet I know of where you can easily buy music for
| download (i.e. you actually own it).
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| You can buy and download DRM-free music from Apple and
| Amazon.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Also Qobuz - I like the 'hi res' availability and various
| format choices
|
| One of the few services that seems to give Linux users
| like myself a decent experience
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| As lossless files?
| mftb wrote:
| I use Bandcamp. I started because many of the artists I
| listen too, put their music on Bandcamp. I briefly
| considered paying for Spotify, but at every turn they make
| it difficult to get to the music I want to play. Why would
| I pay for that?
| jdr23bc wrote:
| AFAIK royalties are paid out for every stream over 30 seconds
| long. The 'context' (album, playlist, single play) doesn't
| matter. "royalties [are] based on an artist's share of
| overall streams across the platform" [1]
|
| My guess is that playlists lead to more engagement than
| albums. Users listen longer, and discover new music, which
| leads to more listening in the future.
|
| [1] https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/?question=per-stream-
| rate
| nicce wrote:
| I have used spotify-tui for years. It is all about tables and
| lists :-D
|
| https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui
| zouhair wrote:
| I never liked Spotify UI, ever, coming from Foobar2000 it is
| very hard to go to such shitty software
|
| https://i.imgur.com/O0aHYHO.jpeg
| mouse_8b wrote:
| That's a pretty good UI.
|
| I made a simple app to shuffle Spotify albums that you might
| like. Check it out at www.bandtr.com
| rizzaxc wrote:
| looks neat. is the project open source?
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| It's not just yet, but a quick look at my GitHub -
| https://github.com/tom-james-watson/ - should tell how that's
| likely to work out. The good thing is that the app is all
| client-side and so there's no need to monetize.
| LilBytes wrote:
| Followed on Twitter and GH, your screengrabs look awesome.
| Looking forward to testing it out <3
| quercusa wrote:
| Just submitted your WikiTrivia game - very fun.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| > The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually
| powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative
| interface
|
| In most big web services, actual functionality in the API
| normally seems to leads to its eventual deprecation. Will be
| interesting to see how this one plays out.
| rzzzt wrote:
| IIRC, the API is for paying users only.
| coob wrote:
| Seems fair enough
| ruune wrote:
| Some parts of it are free, getting general data and
| statistics for example. But if you want to use a third
| party front-end, you'll need premium
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| Yeah that of course is a worry I've had but hopefully the
| functionality is core enough that it should be pretty stable.
| stavros wrote:
| Didn't they deprecate libspotify the other day?
| zorr wrote:
| libspotify != their API. Libspotify is a long-deprecated
| client library that allowed local playback. If you are OK
| with running one of the official clients for actual
| playback you can use the API to build an alternative
| browsing/controller client.
|
| With some caveats though as I mentioned in another comment.
| Their API for controlling playback doesn't work well with
| Sonos players for example.
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| If you combine their API with their web playback SDK, you
| don't need an official client running. That means my app
| is completely standalone whilst being built only using
| officially supported endpoints.
| [deleted]
| capableweb wrote:
| Not sure if you could call that "the other day", I think it
| happened back in 2015 or something like that.
| stavros wrote:
| I meant this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31420722
|
| Oh, apparently they're completely blocking access now,
| yay.
| capableweb wrote:
| In favor of the alternative SDK, whose native SDK seems
| to be just around the corner. Otherwise there is always
| librespot (https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot).
|
| 7 years to go from announcing the deprecation to actually
| removing it seems fair to me. Miles difference from what
| I'd expect any other company to do (looking at you
| Google, who seem to announce a deprecation and go through
| with it in the very same month).
| stavros wrote:
| Oh, they're releasing an alternative SDK? That's great, I
| don't like being tied to the official client and
| releasing an alternative SDK ensures I'll stay with them.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| The alternative SDK has been "just around the corner"
| ever since the original deprecation.
| Reason077 wrote:
| It was declared deprecated in 2015, but was actually
| disabled/removed in May 2022.
| Reason077 wrote:
| I've deliberately frozen my Spotify on the April 30th, 2021
| version largely for this reason. It's one of the last versions
| that still supported the "classic" UI, which is much snappier
| and has a proper, compact songs table and a decent _albums_
| view.
|
| Still works great with zero compatibility issues that I've
| noticed.
|
| http://mckinlay.net.nz/images/Spotify-Screenshot.png
| paol wrote:
| Yep, I did exactly the same. Saw the new UI, hated it,
| reinstalled the previous version and froze it. Still working
| fine.
|
| apt version tells me the good version is 1:1.1.42.622 (the
| most recent is 1:1.1.84.716).
| Reason077 wrote:
| Mine's 1.1.58.820 with ui.experience_override="classic" set
| in Spotify's prefs file.
| lkfjasdlkjfsad wrote:
| i remember this UI update.
|
| this UI update (the version after the April 30 2021 version)
| should be recorded as a possible worst UI change in the
| history of software.
| madisp wrote:
| Album listener here too. I really liked the "Shuffle albums"
| feature in iTunes so I built a tiny webapp to give me a random
| album from my library - https://shuffle.ninja
| lucsky wrote:
| How do you deal with playback? The Spotify web playback SDK
| requires browsers DRM support, and baseline Electron does not
| include Chrome's Widevine CDM libraries. I know there are
| alternative Electron "distribution" which try to workaround the
| problem but it only makes the whole thing even more complicated
| :/
| svnpenn wrote:
| You can download or dump your own CDM. I think Spotify uses
| L3, it's pretty straightforward, once you know how to do it.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| My main gripe against Spotify is how they collect your
| listening data and brag to investors about what they can infer
| about you based on it
| sicariusnoctis wrote:
| It would be awesome if you could support "album
| playlists/groups/tags" which are stored on Spotify servers
| using the first track for each album in a standard playlist.
| fattless wrote:
| I agree, spotifys ux is terrible. Nowadays though I dont notice
| it as much, probably because i use it every day. But I have
| complaints.
|
| Ive mentioned it before but their mobile design sucks. I use it a
| lot in my car, so usually ill keep the playback screen open amd
| just swipe when I need to change songs, simple and probably safe.
| But if I swipe ever so slightly upward, it opens the lyrics
| function, so I have to look down, see what happened, swipe, then
| get back to driving. I get im not using it the way it is
| "supposed" to be used, but its an akward design choice anyways.
| When are the lyrics that on the fly important, and even when im
| looking at the screen I still mess it up.
|
| That and the issues ive been having with the desktop app. Maybe
| its just my hardware but it never seems to just open om the first
| try, I usually have to close, then reopen it.
| gonzalocasas wrote:
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Use the web interface. With Adblock you can play any song and
| play entire albums, in order, for free.
| olingern wrote:
| I agree with the post. I should be able to set how I view my
| search results. Not everyone has the bandwidth to download all of
| the album art.
|
| My most recent, frustrating bug is setting an album or podcast to
| be available offline and then having to wait 30 seconds to 1
| minute for the iOS app to give up on finding the network while in
| airplane mode.
|
| Like another top comment mentions, there seems to be no cohesive
| vision.
|
| If a true competitor ever emerges, I'm happy to jump ship. I
| enjoy the subscription experience a lot.
|
| p.s. - I never want ads or popups for new album drops. I'd take a
| "feed" with search available over whatever "Home" is.
| Amplifix wrote:
| Less is more
| moolcool wrote:
| Spotify's UI is the absolute worst. The craziest thing to me is
| that it's never improved either, it's always been down bad. -
| Managing music offline is _terrible_. The first iPod did it well
| in 2001, but Spotify still can't let you navigate your downloaded
| music while offline on mobile at in any reasonable manor - The
| "Now Playing" mechanism is awkward and confusing. Sometimes your
| playlist disappears as you play it, eliminating the "previous
| track" function - If you come across the song while listening to
| a playlist, and you want to switch to listening to song in the
| context of the album instead of the playlist, there's no way to
| do it without restarting the song from the start (Apps like
| Foobar 2000 do this extremely well) - Their recommendation engine
| is (generally) terrible. There's one particular song I get every
| single time I play one of three of my generated "mixes" even
| though I choose "Don't Recommend" every single time it comes on.
| - My generated "mixes" are almost identical every day. Gimme
| something I haven't heard before! - On the topic of not wanting
| to hear a particular artist, they added "Block Artist"
| functionality, as a compromise in response to anger that
| controversial artists like Chris Brown were allowed to stay on
| the platform. Annoyingly though, you can only access this feature
| from mobile. Like if I wanted to listen to The Smiths on my
| laptop for some reason, I'd have to first use my phone to unblock
| them (I blocked them due to the aforementioned "Don't Recommend"
| feature not working) - They are a shitty podcast player, so I use
| the excellent Pocket Casts instead. Unfortunately, there's no way
| to not to be exposed to be inundated with ads for their original
| podcasts whenever you're navigating the app - I resent the idea
| of podcasts being locked to a specific platform in the first
| place. It's bad enough that we have a dozen different streaming
| services, but now we have vendor lockin with podcasts? Give me a
| break. - No lossless audio in 2021 - Artist pages are a
| fragmented mess. Look at the page for Barenaked Ladies for an
| example. Their catalog is hard to navigate because they have such
| a large amount of live albums. Why put live albums in with studio
| albums? - Similarly, multiple editions of the same album are
| listed separately (but not always). Look at the page for The
| Beatles for an example. They have 3 versions of Sgt Peppers
| (various special editions which came out over the years), and
| they are all tagged as 1967. Then they have a "Super Deluxe" of
| Let It Be which apparently came out in 2021. Why do contemporary
| reissues and remasters sometimes have the date of the remaster,
| and other times have dates of the original albums?
|
| I could go on...
| raydiatian wrote:
| A concise explanation: functionalism is secondary to the
| attention economy for modern media platforms.
|
| Hard to advertise in a functional list grid, but yeah like fuck,
| I'm right there with you. It's to the point where I'd rather just
| steal the album off of YouTube. At least there's an ad-blocker.
| xoac wrote:
| Please don't steal off of YouTube, there are better places.
| raydiatian wrote:
| Suggestions?
| teddyh wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/music
| criddell wrote:
| Buy music at a store?
| xoac wrote:
| Listen I am 100% with you and buy a lot from bandcamp,
| but "stealing off of youtube" is just sad
| lukyanovic wrote:
| You could try SoulSeek, it's the best resource for music
| nowadays.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Has been for 20 years IMHO
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Advertising ruins everything. No exceptions. In Spotify's case
| it's an even bigger insult since people are paying for the
| privilege of being advertised to.
| [deleted]
| jarek83 wrote:
| _functionalism is secondary to the attention economy for modern
| media platforms._
|
| Sure, but can't they make the functional layout version
| optional?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The problem I see is that the "attention economy"'s end goal is
| still to be a marketing platform for real, paid _products_. It
| won 't work in a world where there are no products and
| everything is an advertising platform - people won't be paying
| for the "privilege" of seeing ads.
|
| The market has been distorted by VCs and investors who are
| willing to throw shit tons of money towards anything that
| "grows" and generates engagement. This pulled the ground out of
| the model of making products that people pay for - you would
| make money money (off investors) if you just give away your
| product than if you make people pay for it. That's how we ended
| up in the current situation, and there are tons of vested
| interests (people's entire careers are built on this) in
| perpetuating the problem even if the system can't ever be
| sustainable.
|
| The music has to stop at some point though when everything is
| saturated by advertising. That appears to be now given the
| current, massive downturn. Investor money is no longer free or
| easy to come by, so the pendulum will have to swing back to
| making products funded by its end-customers.
| honkler wrote:
| read the book "subprime attention crisis"
| raydiatian wrote:
| I will give Spotify UX one thing: the mobile version has a
| great feature where if I just double click the tab menu
| button that opens up search, it shoots me straight into my
| keyboard. That needs to be standard.
| DarylZero wrote:
| > a world where there are no products and everything is an
| advertising platform
|
| Maybe the advertised products will all be opportunities to
| make money. Occasionally job listings, mostly crypto coins.
| [deleted]
| tonguetrainer wrote:
| Ha, you should try Deezer. I don't even know how to get to my own
| music using their interface.
| mattlondon wrote:
| To be honest the album art view in media catalogs is actually
| quite easy to "scan" if you know what you are looking for
| already. I guess our brains are probably hard wired for this sort
| of visual quickly-spotting-something-
| familair/-important/-dangerous-in-a-jumble-of-other-stuff type
| thing.
|
| I would prefer a toggle to flip between a list (ideally with
| sortable headers etc) and album art cover view though - not
| exactly super complex to resolve.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| This is true, visual search has a optima when the contrast of
| the object in the search field is above certain threshold.
| Below that magic threshold, it is useless (for e.g searching
| for a Jigsaw puzzle piece). But, when visual search works, it
| is probably ridiculously fast for the evolutionary reasons you
| rightfully mentioned.
|
| There are a couple of things when we search for something in a
| text box: We're pattern matching what we think their database
| contains. If the hysteresis between the search and the match is
| small, Album grid view might work. You have to know the cover
| art a-priori though. But if you are vaguely looking for
| something, list is far better.
| night-rider wrote:
| I found the iOS Spotify app dreadful. The UX is so difficult to
| navigate. I can't go into details but I had to uninstall it, it's
| basically unusable.
| franczesko wrote:
| Spotify's UI is a nightmare to use. If someone from the UX team
| hangs out on HN, please pass the message to the right people -
| fix the menu and split podcasts from music.
| Cynosaur wrote:
| I still don't understand why sometimes I click play on an album
| of a specific artists and in half an hour or so songs from a
| completely different artists start playing too. I specifically
| did not click mix or radio or genre - just play on the album
| itself. I have no idea why big companies like that always have to
| have such shitty UI.
| slig wrote:
| Same reason the default YouTube config is to autoplay
| indefinitely: normal people are not bothered, and it turns it
| into a TV.
|
| What I can't figure out is why TF can't we disable the autoplay
| on YouTube playlists.
| onychomys wrote:
| You can turn that behavior off in the settings. On desktop,
| it's in Settings > Autoplay, on mobile (android, anyway), it's
| in Settings > Playback. You'll want to uncheck both "Autoplay
| on this device" and "Autoplay on other devices" in either case.
| Then once your album ends, playback stops.
| Havoc wrote:
| UI and UX got optimized to hell like other streaming services
| chasing metrics at all cost.
|
| Sometimes I think there are companies and apps that would benefit
| from firing their entire UX/UI teams wholesale and then slowly
| rehiring a portion of them as actual problems crop up from their
| absence. A reset to this A/B madness of sorts.
| zorr wrote:
| I have similar issues with their desktop app and the UI seems to
| get worse over time.
|
| Their API is pretty good and I've used it to build a PoC desktop
| client using JavaFX that works using simple table controls and
| local Sqlite caching so I can search/filter my playlist
| "library". The API even has playback controls and nowplaying
| support. Pretty much everything needed to build an alternative
| usable client.
|
| The reason I did not continue with it and I'm still stuck with
| their desktop-(but-actually-web)-client is that the playback
| control API seems to be blocked by Sonos so I cannot use it to
| control my main listening devices.
|
| I love Spotify as a service but their clients are horrible.
| j0112358 wrote:
| I wish so many "modern" things just had "spreadsheet view" and
| "spreadsheet edit" mode.
| theknocker wrote:
| sytelus wrote:
| Do they do any development still? I haven't seen a single useful
| feature come out from the team during past 3 years. Their single
| tap feature is absurdly bad. For some reason, shuffle is never
| truly random and keeps playing same old songs. I know people have
| been complaining about this for years. There is no easy way to
| merge duplicate playlists. There is tons of things to do but I
| don't think they have any development team anymore. They rode on
| popularity, founders cashed out, bought private islands and now
| they probably only have small maintenance team to keep the lights
| on.
| sorokod wrote:
| One can reverse engineer the ideal customer according to Spotify.
|
| It is a person who to a large extent gave up on strong personal
| preferences and is comfortable with algorithmic/business driven
| replacement.
| wyager wrote:
| Spotify's algorithmic song selection seems pretty mediocre to
| me. I think it might get confused by multi-genre listening.
| criddell wrote:
| Sometimes their algorithmic playlist is exactly what I want.
| For me, it has been good for discovery.
|
| Other times I just want to play on album, from start to finish,
| in order, and then stop. For some reason, Spotify has trouble
| with the last part - stopping. There are two autoplay options
| and I keep turning them off and Spotify keeps turning them back
| on.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| First time I tried out Spotify I as horrified to find that so
| many common functions are behind a pay wall. I forgot which one
| but probably just too many to recall. I will never use Spotify.
| slowmotiony wrote:
| I like how the OP mentioned "Spotify's buddy, Apple Music". I
| work in IT for 15 years and I legit have problems navigating the
| app, I thought I must be stupid or something. Same with Tidal,
| just absolutely abhorrent UI where nothing makes any sense. Wanna
| go back to the Playlist you were literally just listening to a
| couple hours ago? That would be four clicks, three scrolls, a
| swipe and two jumping jacks. Want to listen to your favorite song
| from that playlist? Well then I hope it's not a long playlist
| because we removed the album arts for no reason. Guess you gotta
| squint your eyes pretty hard while scrolling and you'll find it
| eventually. Good luck.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > I work in IT for 15 years and I legit have problems
| navigating the app
|
| I have the same issue, just with YouTube Music (regardless of
| platform). Other applications I cannot figure out how to
| navigate includes Slack and Snapchat. Snapchat is on the phone,
| of cause, but sometimes I just need to exit the app, because I
| can't figure out how to get back. Slack... I just don't know,
| it looks like one of those crazy Chinese chat application that
| does EVERYTHING, or a Japanese newspaper.
|
| Installing and using a Linux desktop 25 years ago was easier
| than using some of these applications.
| sofixa wrote:
| > because I can't figure out how to get back
|
| Are you on iOS? IIRC it doesn't have a back button/gesture,
| unlike Android, and that's the only way that makes sense to
| me, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.
|
| Regarding Slack, maybe it's different on iOS, but it looks
| relatively straightforward - on login you get the list of
| channels and DMs, you can click on one, and then go back with
| a button next to the channel name, which does a left to right
| animation which implies you can just swipe left-right for
| that thing. What else is there? Long press for message
| details/options is the same across many messaging apps.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Yes, it's iOS. There might be a gesture, but those have
| zero discoverability. Especially when you're left handed,
| then many of them feels wrong.
|
| I never used Slack on iOS, it might be better than on the
| desktop. The desktop application doesn't use as many
| resources as the internet had led me to believe, so that's
| nice, but the interface as WAAAY too busy to be effective
| as a communications platform. I still miss HipChat, and
| while it has its own set of problem, I honestly think I
| prefer the train wreck that is Google Chat.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Now that they are the market leader, Spotify does not have any
| business incentive to make their app nice to use. In fact, their
| incentives are to keep you paying but not listening, since that
| maximizes their ROI.
| clolege wrote:
| Also - can we get a queue that clears itself when I click Play on
| an album, and that I can add songs to the front of?
|
| I added a +1 to the "Play Next" community feature request [0].
| Not sure if one exists for the queue clearing behavior, but I
| would definitely +1 that too if I found it.
|
| [0] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Queue-Queue-
| to...
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Spotify loves to use big images, long song lines and then stick
| the buttons that you need in (...)
| baby wrote:
| I've been extremely frustrated by Apple Music/iTunes Match over
| the years. The whole reason I use that combo is that I got a big
| library of MP3 of my own, and this allows me to upload them as
| well as download my whole library. It doesn't always work though,
| I've noticed that songs have disappeared over the years which is
| worriesome. I constantly get errors when I try to add new songs.
| Chinese or nicher songs are not always on Apple music, but always
| on youtube, so I sometimes have to download the song from youtube
| in MP3. It's hard to figure out what songs I've listened to when
| I listen to their radios (so that I can add them to my library).
| And in general searching for a song in my library (basic feature)
| is an awful experience. Should I move to spotify?
| wutbrodo wrote:
| I tried switching from YouTube music to spotify recently and was
| shocked that they don't have a _music library_ feature: a table
| of songs that you can slice by artist, album, etc, in the manner
| of every music player since the dawn of time.
|
| How does anyone serious about music use it? Did I somehow miss
| that spotify is only intended for casual, "I'll listen to
| whatever"-type users?
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I've got tired of this stuff so I just went back to downloading
| music. It has friction but in the end it's much better to have my
| music in my regular music player.
| wccrawford wrote:
| It really hampers discoverability, though. I've used Youtube
| Music for quite a while now, and I discovered a _lot_ of songs
| that I really like. (And way more that I didn 't.) Without a
| service pushing those other songs on me (and not listening to
| the radio with all its commercials!) I'm not sure how I'd find
| new songs, especially ones that came out years ago and I just
| never heard them.
|
| This might even include genres that I wouldn't think to look
| in. I'm very picky about music, but it's across most genres so
| far. I can't really rule anything out... Even foreign music.
| `Alors En Danse` comes to mind quickly.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| For me regular YT is enough for discovering new stuff, and
| fan websites are even better.
|
| I feel like i look like a neoludite but honestly, it's just
| better.
| alerighi wrote:
| You have a lot of ways to discover new songs, friends, radio,
| YouTube. Then when you find the song that you like you can
| download them, possibly not from YouTube but in FLAC quality
| (that is better than the shitty mp3 that Spotify gives you)
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| I recently switched to Deezer, and the app web and webapp are so
| much more usable. And you can still upload missing tracks and
| sync them to your phone!
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Deezer is way better but the catalog is smaller too.
| corney91 wrote:
| Personally I've not found that, I used Tune My Music to sync
| across 140 playlists of probably 10k songs from Spotify and
| not many came up as "not available". I have found their
| library for children's profiles more limited though.
| [deleted]
| azifali wrote:
| +1 on the frustration. The UX is bad on desktops, mobiles and in-
| car systems..
| greenpresident wrote:
| Where does it work well, tablets?
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| Only in the investors board room
| glennos wrote:
| +1000 I hate the Spotify interface. Why the f can't we get a full
| list of tracks for an artist?
| tfsh wrote:
| Anyone aware of decent alternative Spotify clients for Android
| (rooted is fine)? I can't stand the Spotify app.
| b3morales wrote:
| > If there is a piece of information about a podcast that is the
| least useful, that would be the cover art.
|
| Slightly disagree with this. When you're searching for something
| whose cover art you know well, the visual match is definitely the
| fastest way for you to get to it.
|
| Truncating the title/track info on the other hand, I agree is
| pretty unforgivable.
| rednum wrote:
| I used to really like Spotify when I first installed it long time
| ago, but over the years they worked really hard to make me hate
| them with passion. It feels like their motto is "Change for
| change's sake", they seem to remove and add stuff randomly,
| shuffle UI elements whenever they want to, etc. In the meantime,
| the basic functionalities regress. I had the app bug out on me
| countless times in weird ways; offline stuff disappearing,
| freezes when clicking on an album, that one time when I was
| listening on headphones and suddenly Spotify changed volume from
| minimum to max and almost gave me hearing damage, etc.
|
| Some time ago I moved to Tidal. It's not perfect, the search is
| inferior, the app bugs out sometimes too; but at least they don't
| seem to change it that much.
| capableweb wrote:
| It's fun (scary maybe?) how ones experience can be so different
| with the same software. I use Spotify daily on a number of
| different platforms (iOS, Android, Linux [Arch + Ubuntu],
| Windows and macOS) and never experienced any of those issues. I
| also can only remember ~3 redesigns since I started using
| Spotify back in 2007 or something like that, none of them have
| significantly moved around the playback controls, although the
| overall browsing experience has changed a lot.
|
| Edit: Continuing to read the HN comments, it seems some people
| (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31618177) have a
| constantly shifting UI, possibly driven by Spotify doing A/B
| testing. Could be that some locations (the US?) are subjected
| to this while others are not. I've used a total of 5 accounts
| since I started using Spotify, and never had anything change
| day-to-day when using it, so doesn't seem to be account-based.
| sprremix wrote:
| There are some alternative frontends for Spotify available. None
| of the ones I found works on M1 mac, but Windows and Linux users
| have some options available.
|
| https://github.com/jpochyla/psst
|
| https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue
|
| https://github.com/xou816/spot
| imbnwa wrote:
| Psst runs on Rosetta just fine on my M1 Mini. Only issue
| they're using drawing the window themselves and it has issues
| re-drawing itself after wake
| sgarrity wrote:
| RIP Rdio
| kilroy123 wrote:
| It really was the best back in the day.
| asdojasdosadsa wrote:
| Only reason I use Spotify (Premium = no ads) is that I don't have
| to manage my music anymore and I can find all the music I need /
| want. But holy moly it is going towards a bad direction, in fact
| so bad that I am considering moving to Apple Music...
|
| Their desktop app used to have a "search bar" in their Home -view
| which is now moved to a separate "Search" -view, which is.. one
| of the most annoying things ever.
|
| I used to boot up Spotify, hit ctrl+f, type the playlist or
| artist I was looking for and click.
|
| Now it's just a mess.
|
| 1/5
|
| edit: remove curse words
| moosimoose wrote:
| In the desktop app, press '?' to get a list of shortcuts.
| Ctrl-l opens search and focuses the input field, from any page.
| Ctrl-f searches in the current playlist or page.
| gerardnll wrote:
| I'm sorry, but... now that we are speaking about Spotify... can
| we get Airplay 2 PLEASE? It's been so long since they said they
| were working on it...
| warent wrote:
| > Hmm. What the fuck is this!? Why are you trying to be edgy?
|
| This killed me lol. Very true. Thanks for the write-up.
|
| I left Spotify after a few years of using it and currently am
| trying Tidal because they pay the artists more apparently? Sadly,
| however, they're guilty of the same UX problems.
| rickstanley wrote:
| Does anyone know a "good" source of torrent fo music? I'm tired
| of Spotify and Deezer, the former not giving me the free choice
| of settings to, say, disable podcasts and the latter not having a
| "native" linux client at all. I'm going for Gnome's Music app +
| stored music somewhere.
| teddyh wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/music
| revorad wrote:
| Try cmd+K - it brings up a search modal which shows results in a
| table.
| miduil wrote:
| On Linux it's alt+K, awesome works great thank you for the tip.
|
| This it how it looks like: https://imgur.com/sxXKG2s
| informalo wrote:
| Also discovered this by accident recently. I have 200+
| playlists and this type of search is the most reliable way of
| finding a saved or self-created playlist by name (looking at
| you "normal" Spotify search that always shows others' public
| playlists of the same name first).
|
| Funny enough it's not documented, so let's see how long it will
| stick around for: https://support.spotify.com/kr-
| en/article/keyboard-shortcuts...
| block_dagger wrote:
| UIs are designed by children these days.
| kristaps wrote:
| Spotify UI in general feels like way too many product managers
| aggressively justifying their existence instead of making what
| the end user actually needs.
| cube00 wrote:
| The hilarious thing is their "community" is full of up-voted
| suggestions in the thousands for things the end user actually
| needs.
| savrajsingh wrote:
| What users need is actually quite boring. No one gets promoted
| with boring.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| That's the playbook of any tech startup in the last decade.
| Live off an unviable business propped up by VC then rinse and
| repeat.
| cybg wrote:
| I used this when I had subscription.
| https://github.com/jpochyla/psst Now I download directly to my sd
| card.
| brainzap wrote:
| at least it now has built in lyrics (even when sometimes not in
| sync)
| [deleted]
| john___matrix wrote:
| The goal with this design (same for Netflix etc) is not to show
| you the results you want to see in the most efficient format,
| it's to push what they want you to see.
|
| It's even more apparent on Netflix where the UI has got
| progressively worse over the years to the point it's basically
| unusable to discover stuff you actually want to see - I mean,
| large rows of "you watched this already, here it is again".
| why-el wrote:
| If a Spotify PM is collecting feedback: If I go to a song's Radio
| to try and discover similar songs, do not play me songs I already
| "liked" (ones with the heart icon highlighted), it defeats the
| purpose of going to the radio.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| I just assume this and all UI weirdness in programs these days
| are dark patterns and they work very well for whatever nefarious
| reason the company uses them for.
| lapser wrote:
| Spotify is horrendous. Their UI is subpar. Their mix of podcasts
| with songs is odd at best (seriously, I never listen to podcasts,
| why can't I switch it off completely?). Their shuffle is just
| not. Imagine listening to the same 20ish songs from a playlist of
| nearly 2k songs. How can you mess up shuffle that bad?
|
| It's also not easy to move away from it. It requires time and
| effort. Time that many don't have.
| kirso wrote:
| I always wondered about this. I had sooooo many songs saved yet
| I have been only listening to probably 20% of them. Why is
| that?
| tunap wrote:
| Revenues from licensing. Full stop.
| wharfjumper wrote:
| Can you elaborate please? I thought their revenue was from
| users periodic subscriptions. Do you mean there are certain
| songs with lower licensing costs that the algorithm will
| prefer?
| johnywalks wrote:
| > podcasts with songs
|
| I really hate that. They are completely different pieces of
| content but NOOOO, they want to be the "all audio" platform.
| Trufa wrote:
| If you're ok with using google's product...
|
| I've switched to Youtube music and never looked back, better
| (simpler ui), live music, (no ads in Youtube since I have to
| pay anyway cause otherwise it becomes unusable).
|
| For some people Spotify is the next best thing since sliced
| bread, but I think I'm onto the pattern, Spotify is great if
| you like to vibe with what other people are listening to, all
| the suggestions seem to lead to the mainstream. I don't mean it
| in any kind of dissing way, I honestly think it's great that
| there's a sort of communal feeling where people are listening
| to the same things, but for my particular tastes it drives me
| crazy to start with my obscure weird hipstery song and 6 songs
| later it's suggesting Reggaeton. YT music seems to flow in the
| direction of similar songs way better.
|
| I know I honestly sound like a Google shill, but I honestly
| pretty much dislike (I was going to use despise but it's too
| strong of a word) what they have become, but my pragmatism just
| makes me keep going back to them (unfortunately?).
| noahtallen wrote:
| YouTube music's integration with YouTube is too weird for me.
| I used a service to try to import my Spotify into YouTube
| music, and it did two things that I can't stand:
|
| 1. Subscribed me to every single artist in my artist library
| on YouTube. It took a long time to clean up my YouTube
| subscriptions.
|
| 2. All my playlists are also YouTube playlists, which isn't
| what I want.
|
| 3. The tool was fully incapable of transferring my _library_
| over, because YouTube music's API is limited. So no albums or
| artists can transfer to the library section.
|
| If I can't transfer my library over, keeping a semblance of
| organization (such as maintaining a chronological list of
| "date added" for my songs), I'm gonna struggle to use any
| alternatives when Spotify does good enough.
| darkerside wrote:
| I read a blog post about this at some point. When people say
| shuffle, they don't actually mean random. They mean, songs I
| haven't heard in a while.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Yes, and isn't generating a random order, then playing the
| songs in the album/playlist in that generated order the best
| way to do that? Ie, no repeats until every song has been
| played. That's how the MIX button on my car CD player works,
| that's how my MP3 player works, and that's how the Phonograph
| music player on my phone works. Why should Spotify be any
| different?
| lapser wrote:
| Spotify's algorithm doesn't do "songs I haven't heard in a
| while", it does " here's 20 songs from your playlist, have
| fun with it for the next few weeks. So even if I "songs I
| haven't heard in a while", Spotify's garbage algorithm is not
| it. At this rate, I'd much prefer an actually random
| playlist.
|
| I've been having to work around it by copying over the
| playlist I was shuffled, running it through shuf, and then
| putting it in to a separate playlist, and lastly, disable
| shuffle. It's garbage, but it's better than what Spotify
| produces.
| wombat-man wrote:
| My guess is they pay per play. So to minimize plays, they try
| to play songs you won't skip, which, naturally are songs you
| didn't skip the last time they popped up on shuffle.
|
| I'm sure their stats tell them that this gets people to skip
| less, but it's infuriating when you actually want to shuffle a
| big list.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Spotify's been making a soft pivot into podcasts (as
| original/exclusive content, they can be more profitable plus
| you don't have to deal with record labels). So they're trying
| to promote those.
| flycaliguy wrote:
| Spotify was promoting a podcast to me for a while called "c*m
| town" (add a u). It was so gross, the album cover was written
| in white liquid. I could not make it go away! One of the worst
| UI experiences ever, actually made my stomach turn.
| easton wrote:
| It's worth noting that said podcast is (or was, at least) #1
| on Patreon in terms of number of people paying money to the
| creator(s). I bet that makes it really popular on Spotify,
| and if you have explicit content turned on, that's probably
| why it was recommended.
|
| There should still be a master "turn off podcasts" button,
| although since it's the only way Premium subscribers are
| still exposed to ads, fat chance of that happening.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Not the only way. There are also promotional pop-ups every
| now and then and I've heard of them introducing an option
| for artists to pay for better rankings.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Cum Town can be a fun podcast, but it just doesn't belong in
| between music. "I want to focus on somebody talking about
| something" is a very different mood than "I want to tune out
| with some music".
|
| I get the business incentives, but I have to imagine some
| manager somewhere going "Perfect, it's both audio content!".
| so_dewy wrote:
| To combat the shuffle I split my playlists into bite sized ones
| around 50-100 songs. Works great for me
| matwood wrote:
| I've never understood the Spotify love. I tried it long ago and
| didn't like it at all. Ended up on GPM until Google pushed me
| to YTM. Now on AM, and it works fine with how I listen to
| music.
|
| I wonder if it's just different ways that people listen to
| music that lead them to prefer one service over another?
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| _> I 've never understood the Spotify love._
|
| I started using it when it was launched or shortly after,
| before most of the alternatives (including Youtube Music)
| even existed. It was great ~10 years ago.
|
| I still use it because I'm invested into it: we have our
| premium family account, with all smart speakers configured to
| play songs using it, we have playlists, out of the music I
| like I know what's available and what's missing and I have
| acquired what's missing by other means (but switching to
| another service would mean different songs/artists would be
| missing, etc.)
|
| Compound that with lack of time (work, parenting, etc.) and
| while the Spotify UX has really gone downhill, it would have
| to get really, really bad for me to switch...
|
| Walled gardens are evil. But so convenient...
| mjrbrennan wrote:
| I know what you mean here. I used to download and
| meticulously tag my music and listen on an iPod classic.
| Sure maybe Spotify might not be ideal, but I do not have
| the time to fiddle around with all that anymore, and
| especially don't want to spend tons more time on the
| computer than I already do. I am the same as you too with
| the smart speakers and family account too. The alternative
| is so much more effort, for not a huge amount of benefit.
|
| That being said I have started collecting vinyl, which I do
| enjoy, but don't often have the extra money laying around
| each month to buy more. One day I hope to have a nice
| dedicated setup for it :)
| weazl wrote:
| Way back many years ago Spotify used to be GREAT, the client
| was super efficient and easy to use did everything necessary,
| really.
|
| But then they started butchering it more and more and now
| it's almost completely unusable.
|
| I've been a paying customer since 2009 and I'm thinking of
| cancelling, I don't use it any more because it's just a mess.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Generally speaking, those old versions of Spotify still
| work fine. Just make sure to write-protect your Spotify app
| so it can't update itself.
| spockz wrote:
| > Their shuffle is just not. Imagine listening to the same
| 20ish songs from a playlist of nearly 2k songs. How can you
| mess up shuffle that bad?
|
| I thought it was just me! I did notice that sometimes when this
| happens the numbers being skipped are "this song is currently
| not available for playback" or some such message.
|
| I seem to listen to the same music a lot actually so just
| buying the CD would be more cost efficient.
| joek1301 wrote:
| Spotify shuffle is indeed not (uniformly) random, as
| confirmed by this blog post[1]. The post is eight years old,
| so it is highly possible the algorithm has changed.
|
| [1]: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-
| shuffle-son...
| the_only_law wrote:
| What really floors me is their lyric integration.
|
| Initially I though "oh cool neat", and although I never noticed
| inaccuracies, I was willing to let it to, lyric listings aren't
| always 100% accurate anyway, especially for older underground
| stuff of people who have indecipherable vocals at times (Mike
| IX Williams for example)
|
| However as time passed I noticed in a _ton_ of the songs I was
| listening to, the lyrics would be missing entire verses, hooks,
| choruses or in occasion show the lyrics to a 100% unrelated
| song. There were also blatant typos, that looked like someone
| was quickly typing the lyrics on their phone and didn't check
| to read and bad autocorrects or anything.
| lapser wrote:
| Lyrics are provided by Musixmatch, and are user contributed.
| If lyrics are missing or bad, it's because Musixmatch has it
| like that. You can contribute!
| alerighi wrote:
| I recently switched to Tidal. Same price, better audio quality,
| better user interface. I try it out for a couple of months to
| see how it goes.
|
| By the way, I'm always tempted to go back to pirating, and use
| these services just to discover new music. Given the cost of
| storage today disks I can easily get 1Tb of FLAC music on my
| NAS, and discard any streaming service. So I can also get music
| in a quality that you can't get on a streaming service, all you
| find is remastered albums that doesn't always sound as good as
| the original.
| tarboreus wrote:
| Some good private trackers that have better recommendations
| than Spotify. Look around.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I honestly don't care about the UI design at all as much as it
| be absolutely infuriating because it's extremely slow on my
| still fairly new android phone.
| shbooms wrote:
| The worst UI offense to me is the new playlist view that came
| with their new desktop UI last fall. They went from having
| seperate columns for Song Title and Artist Name and bundled
| them into two rows within a single column. Not only does this
| make scanning through a long list of songs/artists much more
| difficult, it means they've taken away the ability to sort a
| playlist by Artist which seems like a major downgrade in my
| opinion as someone who keeps most playlists sorted by Artist
| most if not all the time.
| bananskalhalk wrote:
| Press once: sort by title, twice: reverse title, thrice: sort
| by artist, four times: reverse artist.
|
| Horrendous, but the capability is still there and, of course,
| completely impossible to find.
| gryn wrote:
| I guess they got inspired from the way youtube does it (or
| maybe the other way around)
| mayneack wrote:
| Plex (and plexamp) have really brought back the old iTunes
| interface I didn't know I was missing.
|
| I can search and get a list, I can sort within that list by
| whatever I want, I can create a "smart playlist" for "100 tracks,
| with more than 5 plays that were last played more than 3 months
| ago". There's also a "shuffle albums" feature that I didn't
| realize I missed from iTunes. You can also add a tidal
| subscription within plex, but it's a little clunky so I just
| stick to my library.
| mr90210 wrote:
| I've moved on to another service once I realised that there was
| no way to remove JRE Podcast from my homepage, despite the fact I
| hadn't listened it in months.
| ducktective wrote:
| Is there a Spotify alternative that uses YouTube but actually has
| the former's features like cataloguing albums and recommended
| playlists?
|
| I just want to search some songs and play them.
| berkes wrote:
| Audiotube is one: https://apps.kde.org/audiotube/
| sofixa wrote:
| I quite like YouTube Music's UI. The suggestions to relisten to
| songs I've listened to, the autosuggest continue on the same type
| of music works really well and has helped me discover many new
| bands i now like.
|
| The search manages to show the album art, title, artist and type
| ( song or album, and it's grouped by song, album, artist).
|
| And of course there's the added bonus that it comes with a
| YouTube Premium subscription, so i get good music UI + no YouTube
| ads + YouTube mobile app downloads.
| layer8 wrote:
| While its UI and its discovery algorithms could use some
| improvement, at least the mobile app UI doesn't change all the
| time, and search results are lists, not tiles.
| LegitShady wrote:
| ...and somehow, quite a while after shuttering google music,
| youtube music app still has no horizontal mode.
| blenderdt wrote:
| Today everything is focused on making money. The focus on money
| makes the experience good for the ones that make the money, but
| for the end user it means everything turns into one giant ad.
|
| That's why Spotify uses tiles instead of tables. The tiles are
| important for the content producer, not for the Spotify user. A
| tile can scream at you 'Listen to me!', a row in a table cannot
| do this.
|
| It shows that Spotify is making more money from content creators
| than content consumers.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| Yep. I wonder, if the balance has gone too far without any
| checks or balances? A/B testing our way into oblivion. May be,
| we should do a massive A/B test between 15 year old UI and
| today's UI. They'd probably have to modify old UIs to add some
| more images because visuals dominate.
|
| I realize these things probably have commercial implications,
| but goddamn it feels good to rant.
| blenderdt wrote:
| The problem is: a frustrated user is not a leaving user. So
| as long the users stay at the platform and more money can be
| made the user experience will be crap.
|
| Spotify has 2 types of users, the creator and consumer. As
| long as there is more money to be made from the creator user
| they will also A/B test for that user.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I cancelled my spotify subscription after they banned libspotify
| from working in May. I was using it in Mopidy using the Iris
| plugin to get this nice table of songs. Now I'm spending my
| subscription fee on MP3s to grow my local MP3 collection and
| curating local playlists in Iris just like the olden days. So far
| so good.
|
| https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/
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