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At this point, I'd be willing to pay for a Spotify client that works exactly the same, but just ignores the existence of podcasts entirely. I use a dedicated po
by jreese 5y ago
At this point, I'd be willing to pay for a Spotify client that works exactly the same, but just ignores the existence of podcasts entirely. I use a dedicated podcast client when I want to listen to podcasts, and they keep shoving them in my face and taking up precious UI real estate everywhere.
But any client without support for Spotify Connect might as well be dead to me. Controlling my wifi speakers from my phone, or playing music on my desktop Mac from my laptop or gaming PC is critical functionality at this point.
- matthewfcarlson 5y agoI'm with you 100%. If they had a decent podcast experience, I'd be happy to switch but it's terrible. Why can't I mark something as already played?
- josephg 5y agoYep; I'm a paying customer of spotify and I like some of the podcasts they have. But they don't have the gap removal + speed controls of Overcast (my fav podcast program on my phone). So I'm in this weird situation of never wanting to listen to any podcasts through the spotify app, which I'm paying for. And then when I want to listen to music (eg while coding) I have to wade through podcasts which are intentionally designed to blend in with music recommendations in spotify's apps. I hate it. If any spotify PMs are listening: - If spotify wants me to listen to podcasts, let me do it from my existing podcast app. I'm sure the developer of Overcast (and other apps) would happily add a spotify login button for a song if you ask nicely and offered to pay. - Let users disable podcasts entirely in the spotify app. - In the spotify app, give podcasts a consistent visual differentiator so I can easily visually separate them from music. Nobody wants to be tricked into listening to a podcast instead of music. Maybe make the "album cover" for podcasts a rectangle instead of a square. Or change the background color for all podcast related content to blue so I can find podcasts visually (or filter them out visually) while scrolling.
- fossuser 5y agoI don’t think Spotify wants you to be able to use your favorite app. Their strategy is to take the open protocol of podcasts and pay the hosts to turn that into centralized tracks on Spotify to force you as the user to use Spotify to listen to it. It’s about control intentionally - that’s the strategy.
- tootie 5y agoYeah there's currently a war on to be the YouTube of podcasts and Spotify is currently in the best position.
- briish 5y agoI was really surprised that Podcasts on Spotify became that popular. Thats what exclusives can do, iI guesd
- fossuser 5y agoWhen I used Spotify I had wished my podcasts were able to be there since it would be convenient to just have the tracks in the same UI. What I wanted though was just the ability to add podcasts via the open protocol url for them (how every other podcast app works) or for them to allow hosts to upload tracks. Spotify instead saw an aggregation play - they could pay hosts for exclusivity and take those podcasts away from their open distribution into a distribution entirely controlled by Spotify. This is a hostile move to end users (and ultimately most content creators too in the end).
- vxNsr 5y agoSpotify has spent over half a billion dollars on acquisitions and investments into its podcasts division, there is zero chance they ever intentionally implement anything that might impede the returns on that spending.
- josephg 5y ago
- yupper32 5y agoYou can. There's a "Mark as played" button in at least the Android Spotify app that I'm looking at right now. Can't comment on anything else, though.
- pornel 5y agoIf you care about Podcasts, don't listen to them on Spotify, ever. Spotify's plan is to build a walled garden around them. Spotify promotes podcasts and buys exclusives so desperately, because their plan is to grow their audience to a too-big-to-fail size, so they start dictating their own terms. Every remaining use of RSS is a business opportunity.
- swiley 5y agoI love my 3.5mm cables for this reason. No negotiating with vendors (except Apple but it's well known that they really suck) just plug and play.
- asdff 5y agoI can't wait to sit my grandchildren on my knee and tell them stories of the magic headphones that you never needed to charge and just worked instantly with practically any audio device ever made by mankind right up until the iPhone 7 was unleashed unto the world.
- swiley 5y agoBetween their screw ups and Pine64's successes that hopefully won't happen.
- eurasiantiger 5y agoRemember to throw in stories about impedance matching and the differences of A/B and T/D class amplifiers, as well as soundstage, acoustic compression and active correction.
- rnestler 5y agoAt least some of these things are kind of unrelated to how the audio signal arrives at the amplifier and are still an issue when connecting speakers to a bluetooth enabled amplifier.
- eurasiantiger 5y agoAbsolutely, but the thought that a 3,5mm jack makes everything always compatible is nonsense. Sure, it will work with most consumer products in some way, but it is not a given that it is working as intended.
- SilverRed 5y agoThey would probably see it like we computers that had memory which did not wipe when powered down. The inconvenience is minor and the benefits large. They will never deal with huge hell balls of cables/headphones. The charging is pretty painless and the airpods pretty much do just work instantly with any Apple device (they can detect which one you are using at the time).
- rubiquity 5y agoCame here to say this. It was hard enough losing Rdio and now Spotify has been on a rapid decline for the last 1-2 years. It used to be a place to listen to music you already knew and maybe find something new and now they do nothing but shove podcasts down your throat. Who that works there is looking at the current UI as an improvement?
- bullfightonmars 5y agoI loved Rdio for the Ui. I subscribed for years. That said Spotify has introduced me to so much music that I missed growing up. The Spotify UI has been pretty painful lately but I have a hard time living because the suggested music selection has been so good.
- tyre 5y agoIt’s insane that Spotify on Mac doesn’t support airplay. When my girlfriend and I moved in together, we got rid of her Alexa devices because privacy and use HomePods. But Spotify doesn’t work with AirPlay for reasons I cannot fathom, so I set her up with a program that will AirPlay specific applications on her Mac. That said, there are open source libraries and clients for AirPlay so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get them supported. I have a Raspberry Pi for streaming to “dumb” speakers.
- fossuser 5y agoI gave up on Spotify because of this - and because of their hostile moves to turn podcasts into another centralized service. Apple Music is still mostly worse without discovery, but at least lossless makes up the quality difference that use to be there.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoI don’t understand, not a user of Airplay - your Mac doesn’t have a way to stream to airplay devices? Why does it come down to the app?
- mrweasel 5y agoThe Mac can use the Airplay device as an output device, but it's not ideal, because that will send ALL sound to the Airplay device. The correct solution is for the application to support Airplay, so that for instance Spotify can stream music to your Airplay device, while the Mac sounds still goes to the speakers of the laptop/iMac.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoThat makes sense, thanks. I remember now I was using Tidal which did have this option.
- bleachedsleet 5y agoAirfoil [1] is worth every penny. The same could be said for pretty much everything Rogue Amoeba makes. It’s also worth noting that Spotify can act as a remote for its own service across devices. So you can start a song playing on your phone and direct the output over AirPlay and then just interface with that session using the desktop client. [1] https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/ https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/
- jfrunyon 5y agoI'd be willing to pay for a Spotify client that allows you to select your audio output device. And yet here we are, 10 years later... Spotify is a marketing platform first and an audio player second.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoWhat platform do you mean? The iOS app lets me select output device. It’s a little icon next to play/pause, kind of half computer screen half bookshelf speaker (monitor/monitor :) I think I remember seeing this on desktop too but at that point why not use the OS sound mixer?
- sbuttgereit 5y agoAndroid works pretty much the same way. I'm usually listening on my PC, but I don't try to control other devices from there so I can't remember if it's possible there.
- poteznykrolik 5y agothis doesn't speak to that point but while we're talking android, the Spotify lite client is so nice for me and my 6 year old phone
- jfrunyon 5y agoNo, the app lets you select what system you're going to listen to Spotify on, not what audio device to use on your system. Sometimes I just want music through my speakers while I have something else piping into my headset. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- lwansbrough 5y agoIf you’re on Windows, you can define audio input and output devices on a per app basis through Windows’ settings. Handy for any app that doesn’t support such configuration (though Spotify obviously should.)
- 5y ago
- gizdan 5y agoCheck out spicetify cli[0]! It patches the Spotify (desktop) client and makes it better. It also adds support for extensions, one of which[1] disables the podcast features. I haven't used the extension so I'm not sure how well it works. Heads up though, the original developer is MIA at the moment and the latest few versions of the client are incompatible. There's an effort by someone to fix the issues and there are other maintainers who mostly just seem to address PRs. Personally I just downgraded the client and it works perfectly. [0] https://github.com/khanhas/spicetify-cli https://github.com/khanhas/spicetify-cli [1] https://github.com/3raxton/spicetify-custom-apps-and-extensions/tree/main/spicetify-hide-podcasts https://github.com/3raxton/spicetify-custom-apps-and-extensi...
- mackrevinack 5y agoi don't like this podcast stuff either. even just the homepage that displays artists (that i will never listen to) is enough to annoy me. i would really love an option to open directly into my playlists or something else. im building up a local music collection at the moment so its not going to be annoying me for too long more
- dangravell 5y agoGot me thinking. I wonder how much scope there is to build apps for platforms like Spotify which are built around a given use case. For example - for people that prefer listening to albums. Or people that only care about political podcasts. Or something. I wonder if the global audience is enough to support indie products like this. Significant platform risk though.