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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 o
by mcjiggerlog 4y ago
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 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 https://twitter.com/tom_j_watson.
- rizzaxc 4y agolooks neat. is the project open source?
- mcjiggerlog 4y agoIt's not just yet, but a quick look at my GitHub - https://github.com/tom-james-watson/ 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.
- bencollier49 4y ago> 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.
- mcjiggerlog 4y agoYeah that of course is a worry I've had but hopefully the functionality is core enough that it should be pretty stable.
- rzzzt 4y agoIIRC, the API is for paying users only.
- stavros 4y agoDidn't they deprecate libspotify the other day?
- capableweb 4y agoNot sure if you could call that "the other day", I think it happened back in 2015 or something like that.
- stavros 4y agoI meant this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31420722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31420722 Oh, apparently they're completely blocking access now, yay.
- capableweb 4y agoIn 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 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).
- ge96 4y agoLooks pretty nice. Is it in a browser wrapper or just on web/built using something else?
- mcjiggerlog 4y agoIt'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.
- iamcreasy 4y agoLooks neat. Do they have SDK to build desktop players? (Excluding wrapping the web SDK around Electron)
- Macha 4y agoNo, 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
- nicce 4y agoI have used spotify-tui for years. It is all about tables and lists :-D https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui
- zouhair 4y agoI never liked Spotify UI, ever, coming from Foobar2000 it is very hard to go to such shitty software https://i.imgur.com/O0aHYHO.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/O0aHYHO.jpeg
- madisp 4y agoAlbum 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 https://shuffle.ninja
- lucsky 4y agoHow 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 4y agoYou can download or dump your own CDM. I think Spotify uses L3, it's pretty straightforward, once you know how to do it.
- javajosh 4y ago>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.)
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoHonestly 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.
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoTurntables are not cheap because of the vinyl revival, so they are trendy, hence expensive. Nobody wants CD players :(
- javajosh 4y agoI 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?
- Reason077 4y agoI'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 http://mckinlay.net.nz/images/Spotify-Screenshot.png
- lkfjasdlkjfsad 4y agoi 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.
- paol 4y agoYep, 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 4y agoMine's 1.1.58.820 with ui.experience_override="classic" set in Spotify's prefs file.
- srrr 4y ago15 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEMA_(German_organization)
- wjamesg 4y agoI’ve long suspected this for Amazon Music
- anticristi 4y agoThanks 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.
- mistermann 4y ago> 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.
- the_only_law 4y agoHah, 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.
- pbreit 4y agoThe 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-Songs-on-Artist-Page/idc-p/5314405 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Mobile-See-all-S...
- BurningFrog 4y agoWhat if you make a playlist with the songs of an album, in order?
- stoicjumbotron 4y agoWoah! Is it similar to Reddit's API with no limit whatsoever and do whatever you want with it?
- sicariusnoctis 4y agoIt 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.
- gentleman11 4y agoMy 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
- henrik_w 4y agoFWIW, 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.
- mouse_8b 4y agoThat'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
- ymolodtsov 4y agoI'm pretty sure they're just targeting the widest demographics where people no longer care about albums, especially in the age of streaming, singles and EPs.
- neycoda 4y agoRecently I've been going through artists by genre and decade, clicking into their discography, looking up their official studio albums on Wikipedia or Discogs, then adding those albums to a playlist for the artist, just for my own listening convenience. Maybe I should be listening by album instead?