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I am mostly confused by what the author thinks the selling point is. > I can’t describe what a breath of fresh air this is compared to how bad modern smartphon

I am mostly confused by what the author thinks the selling point is. > I can’t describe what a breath of fresh air this is compared to how bad modern smartphone music and streaming apps have become. Well, I was hoping they would try to describe it, because personally, I would have to wear my most deeply shaded nostalgia glasses to think that MP3 player UX has ever been comparable to what Spotify offers nowadays. And we can not even directly compare a MP3 player to Spotify, which is paid to do an entirely different and way more complicated job, considering that you are able to browse and organize a completely different and incomparably larger (and automatically growing) set of media. In the end, this feels like a case of someone convincing themselves of a peculiar diet, where the believe in its effectiveness does all the heavy lifting. Which is great, when it works for that person – but probably not applicable in general and likely worse than the market solution.

izacus 4y ago
I don't remember any of the MP3 players desperately trying to shove podcast down my throat instead of showing my music. They also never lost all my downloaded music in the first 30 minutes of an 11 hour flight due to a crash bug. So just in those simple ways Spotify is worse.
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  I've encountered plenty of bugs with portable music players. I've had CD walkman scratch disks, cassette players eat tapes and I've had SD and compact flash storage fail on me too. No technology is beyond failure.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    A CD getting scratched isn't really a bug, it's a limitation of that technology and form factor. Is there anybody on earth that didn't scratch up at least a few accidentally?
    - hnlmorg 4y ago
      It is a bug when the battery compartment is inside CD tray so if the battery flap isn’t shut flush you end up with damaged discs. This isnt normal operation of CD players, it’s a problem with the design of the unit. That said, it was still one of my favourite portable music players because it sounded amazing and supported MP3 CDs too.
cush 4y ago
In terms of UX, it's really hard to beat high fidelity audio and hardware buttons. Spotify is just an app. The real experience is the playback.
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  Hardware buttons I agree with. But the Sony NW-A55 Walkman we are comparing against requires constant touchscreen interaction too so it's not really any better than a smart phone. Plus most phones have hardware buttons for volume anyway. As for high fidelity audio, I doubt there is much between devices these days. I remember back when I was buying portable cassette and, later, CD players there did used to be a real noticeable difference between the audio fidelity of different brands (ironically with Sony often cashing in on their brand and than having worse fidelity than hardware from significantly cheaper competitors). However these days everyone is listening to lossy compression over bluetooth so there isn't really going to be much room for the host hardware to improve. As always, the headphones you use will make much more of an impact.
  - alpaca128 4y ago
    I like to keep music playback separate from my phone because I hate having it interrupted by some random app notification. And on my smartphone I have to push the volume to the max to barely reach the level I consider normal with my headphones. On the Walkman that's not an issue and the difference in sound is immediately noticeable. Of course that doesn't matter if you use Bluetooth, but as there isn't a single decent pair of BT headphones with replaceable batteries on the market I'll keep using cables in the foreseeable future (and headphones have a minimum size, so the manufacturers can't even use their typical excuses for using glue). Of course some phones are quite solid in terms of sound, with some music there's no difference either way, but without comparison you can't really know what's missing unfortunately.
    - hnlmorg 4y ago
      I have done comparisons. :) It used to be that the key differentiator was a hardware's DAC but I can't say I've noticed that much difference in the last 10 years. Even a cheap Chinese phone I used for a bit sounded equivalent. And that was before I switched to bluetooth. I do really notice the difference on non-portable hardware though. I have used a bunch of different USB devices and they vary wildly. I have 4 amplifiers and several audio switching boxed rack mounted right next to me (they power 9 speakers, 2 CRT TVs, 4 LCD monitors and a projector :D).
atoav 4y ago
> but probably not applicable in general and likely worse than the market solution. Worse, for which usecase? I as a musician like to listen to full albums (as opposed to single songs) I like to manually read up on music and then listen to that specific music from that specific world region and era. Spotify can be neat to discover some starting points for that search, but it is arguably shit at the listening experience I am looking for. For people who don't care so much about what is playing in the background it is certainly doing a good job tho. I need to listen a lot to mixes and recordings as well, and an MP3 player certainly has an easier UX for that, than the typical phone - plug it in and copy over. How would you do that on spotify? I use a nextcloud sync setup, which works — but setting that up to work flawlessly with your audio-player app (e.g. poweramp) can be a bit tricky at times. So yeah, Spotify ftw. if you convinced yourself of that peculiar diet, to use your words.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  > Worse, for which usecase? For most use cases. > I as a musician like to listen to full albums [...] How does Spotify prohibits you as a musician from listening to an album or reading up on music or looking at music from eras? I detect nothing in any of these tasks that Spotify would make harder than any of the alternativ ways I know of. If anything it should be easier, considering the considerable amount of meta information that resides in Spotify (for example finding music from a specific era or displaying lyrics) and that you don't have to gather yourself. > How would you do that on spotify? I wouldn't. I would use foobar for that, because that's the right tool for the job. I also try no get confused about what the job is, what the available tools are and which tool can replace which for a specific job.
  - cropcirclbureau 4y ago
    Here's one reason: you can only have playlist of songs. There's no way to collapse songs of a single album to one entry. You might think it's a little change but it completely devastates the experience if you're someone who listens to whole albums. That's not the only UX hurdle if you're someone who curates a library of things to listen to instead of engorging from an algorithm. Sure, you can follow albums and artists but since you can't organize them, these features gets useless if you have anything more than 100 items. The UI is in general is way too simple, with very sparse information density compared to your traditional music player. Was it because of necessity or style that all these previous tools opted for all these features Spotify shirks? I'll let you decide that.
fbnlsr 4y ago
> And we can not even directly compare a MP3 player to Spotify, which is paid to do an entirely different and way more complicated job, considering that you are able to browse and organize a completely different and incomparably larger (and automatically growing) set of media. Spotify has two drawbacks though: you need a constant Internet connection and it removes tracks at will. The constant internet connection can be solved by downloading media to the device, but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing. This is the reason I keep buying CDs. Spotify is an amazing tool to listen on the go but whenever I feel a real connection (no pun intended) with an artist's music, I have to buy their art in a physical format.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing. Blame the copyright holders aka the Big Four/Big Five: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry Streaming services would gladly stream anything you want to you.
  - mosselman 4y ago
    That is still a downside of the system. Even when there is some external force at play. The BigFour/Big Five don't come into your house to take away your CDs.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    Who is to blame is irrelevant.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Nah, I'll just blame Spotify. There are services that let you download to your local storage, whatever you buy from them. Bandcamp is the obvious example, but in the past there was eMusic and even iTunes. Spotify could do it, but they just don't want to. How else are they going to help themselves to your wallet every month? Sure streaming services want to give me anything I desire...anyhting except allow me to download an audio file that I can keep on my system. Then I wouldn't have to give a crap about whether Spotify still had the rights to it.
bartread 4y ago
> MP3 player UX has ever been comparable to what Spotify offers nowadays. You might have different experiences to me. My iPod was never a distraction whilst driving in the way that Spotify, with it's manifold failure modes and inconsistent/unresponsive UX, can be. With depressing regularity I drive without either music or podcasts because that's preferable to dying (or killing someone else) in a car crash because I'm fussing with Spotify after it's crapped out in some weird way yet again. Again, not a problem I ever had with my iPod. I know they do crash occasionally - happened to a friend - but I can't remember a single incident in the 7 - 8 years I used mine regularly (multiple hours, every day) where it crashed. Spotify is terrible software to the point of being dangerous. I can't see how that is desirable UX.
- projektfu 4y ago
  I find Apple Music to be pretty good except in CarPlay where the features that ostensibly make driving safer make it more dangerous. If I'm parked, I have access to the whole collection. If I'm moving, there's a tiny fraction available, or I can use Siri to try to get what I want. If course, Siri is stuck on one language at a time and my collection has many, some of which I can't even pronounce. What could have been a quick scroll to find the album or artist I want becomes a frustrating experience in finding something acceptable for the mood. I'll agree that people with early iPods had an easy time finding their music. If you truly love recommendation engines, that old style is not for you. But it would be nice to have the same interface on CarPlay for the rest of us.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  > You might have different experiences to me. Definitely. Your experience does sound demoralizing. I am not sure I have had Spotify crash on me thus far and certainly not with any regularity. I think it's safe to assume that you have an untypically bad experience, because if what you described was true for most people, Spotify would have no users. Which begs the question, why do you stick to it? There are competing services. How could they possibly do a worse job, in light of what you are describing?
  - criddell 4y ago
layer8 4y ago
The ability of such players to be operated blindly, and to give audio feedback on operations, is a major advantage. Then also the pocketability, compared to today’s huge phones. Lastly, being distraction-free because they are dedicated to sound file playback. No internet, no ads, no hit-and-miss recommendations, no connection issues. Just play what you know you have and like. It’s a simpler life where you have full control.
pier25 4y ago
Spotify has an opportunity here to sell a hi quality portable player with a good DAC and headphones amp. It's obviously a niche product, but if they started streaming in FLAC and paired it with their own audiophile player, it would be a fantastic marketing stunt they would probably turn a profit by selling the devices. God knows what audiophiles do to be able to listen to audio on the go with a good DAC and amp.
lambic 4y ago
I want to listen to my music, the music I've bought, not what spotify throws at me. I'm currently using Youtube Music because it at least lets me store and play my music collection, even though it tries to push me toward the streaming options.
csdvrx 4y ago
> Well, I was hoping they would try to describe it, because personally, I would have to wear my most deeply shaded nostalgia glasses to Leaving aside the UI issues (most of which can be alleviated with hardware buttons having tactile indicators like bumps / different sizes etc), my core concern is you are leaving not just the preservation job (prey none of the albums/songs gets deleted after an IP right renegotiation) but the curation job to Spotify. I don't want that. Curation is the most important thing even. I carefully select the albums I want to listen to. I don't ever want software to try to guess my tastes or fill in the blanks when the playlist is over. It might be good for Spotify as they can show better stats (more tracks listened to, more engagement, whatever) but it's not for me as I'd rather have audio stop to let me take another decision about what I want to listen to: I care about my own experience much more than Spotify might.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
IgniteTheSun 4y ago
> I am mostly confused by what the author thinks the selling point is. ------------------- From the article: > You don’t need to use any special desktop software; you mount the Walkman as a USB storage device and transfer files. Wait… that’s it? Yes! >The player indexes any music you add, but keeps the files in place. This lets me use rsync to regularly diff and copy new ripped CDs or downloaded tracks across, even on FreeBSD. It also decouples syncing from music organising, so no more finagling iTunes in Wine, or using the garbage new macOS Music.app. As a (diagnosed) OCD suffer, this literally makes me happier than it should. ---------- These are features I had in my MP3 player about the time the first iPod came out (looked like a thumbdrive with a couple of buttons and a 2-line LCD screen on its side). Features I highly prefer, along with the fact that no internet connection is required at any time. I'm not looking for a device to be the front end for Spotify, Apple, or any other service - just an MP3 player that lets me play podcasts, music, lectures, etc. - e.g., any audio file that I want to, ideally in most of the common audio formats (including ogg). [Edited for format.]

izacus 4y ago

I don't remember any of the MP3 players desperately trying to shove podcast down my throat instead of showing my music. They also never lost all my downloaded music in the first 30 minutes of an 11 hour flight due to a crash bug. So just in those simple ways Spotify is worse.

hnlmorg 4y ago
I've encountered plenty of bugs with portable music players. I've had CD walkman scratch disks, cassette players eat tapes and I've had SD and compact flash storage fail on me too. No technology is beyond failure.
- rchaud 4y ago
  A CD getting scratched isn't really a bug, it's a limitation of that technology and form factor. Is there anybody on earth that didn't scratch up at least a few accidentally?
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    It is a bug when the battery compartment is inside CD tray so if the battery flap isn’t shut flush you end up with damaged discs. This isnt normal operation of CD players, it’s a problem with the design of the unit. That said, it was still one of my favourite portable music players because it sounded amazing and supported MP3 CDs too.

cush 4y ago

In terms of UX, it's really hard to beat high fidelity audio and hardware buttons. Spotify is just an app. The real experience is the playback.

hnlmorg 4y ago
Hardware buttons I agree with. But the Sony NW-A55 Walkman we are comparing against requires constant touchscreen interaction too so it's not really any better than a smart phone. Plus most phones have hardware buttons for volume anyway. As for high fidelity audio, I doubt there is much between devices these days. I remember back when I was buying portable cassette and, later, CD players there did used to be a real noticeable difference between the audio fidelity of different brands (ironically with Sony often cashing in on their brand and than having worse fidelity than hardware from significantly cheaper competitors). However these days everyone is listening to lossy compression over bluetooth so there isn't really going to be much room for the host hardware to improve. As always, the headphones you use will make much more of an impact.
- alpaca128 4y ago
  I like to keep music playback separate from my phone because I hate having it interrupted by some random app notification. And on my smartphone I have to push the volume to the max to barely reach the level I consider normal with my headphones. On the Walkman that's not an issue and the difference in sound is immediately noticeable. Of course that doesn't matter if you use Bluetooth, but as there isn't a single decent pair of BT headphones with replaceable batteries on the market I'll keep using cables in the foreseeable future (and headphones have a minimum size, so the manufacturers can't even use their typical excuses for using glue). Of course some phones are quite solid in terms of sound, with some music there's no difference either way, but without comparison you can't really know what's missing unfortunately.
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    I have done comparisons. :) It used to be that the key differentiator was a hardware's DAC but I can't say I've noticed that much difference in the last 10 years. Even a cheap Chinese phone I used for a bit sounded equivalent. And that was before I switched to bluetooth. I do really notice the difference on non-portable hardware though. I have used a bunch of different USB devices and they vary wildly. I have 4 amplifiers and several audio switching boxed rack mounted right next to me (they power 9 speakers, 2 CRT TVs, 4 LCD monitors and a projector :D).

atoav 4y ago

> but probably not applicable in general and likely worse than the market solution. Worse, for which usecase? I as a musician like to listen to full albums (as opposed to single songs) I like to manually read up on music and then listen to that specific music from that specific world region and era. Spotify can be neat to discover some starting points for that search, but it is arguably shit at the listening experience I am looking for. For people who don't care so much about what is playing in the background it is certainly doing a good job tho. I need to listen a lot to mixes and recordings as well, and an MP3 player certainly has an easier UX for that, than the typical phone - plug it in and copy over. How would you do that on spotify? I use a nextcloud sync setup, which works — but setting that up to work flawlessly with your audio-player app (e.g. poweramp) can be a bit tricky at times. So yeah, Spotify ftw. if you convinced yourself of that peculiar diet, to use your words.

jstummbillig 4y ago
> Worse, for which usecase? For most use cases. > I as a musician like to listen to full albums [...] How does Spotify prohibits you as a musician from listening to an album or reading up on music or looking at music from eras? I detect nothing in any of these tasks that Spotify would make harder than any of the alternativ ways I know of. If anything it should be easier, considering the considerable amount of meta information that resides in Spotify (for example finding music from a specific era or displaying lyrics) and that you don't have to gather yourself. > How would you do that on spotify? I wouldn't. I would use foobar for that, because that's the right tool for the job. I also try no get confused about what the job is, what the available tools are and which tool can replace which for a specific job.
- cropcirclbureau 4y ago
  Here's one reason: you can only have playlist of songs. There's no way to collapse songs of a single album to one entry. You might think it's a little change but it completely devastates the experience if you're someone who listens to whole albums. That's not the only UX hurdle if you're someone who curates a library of things to listen to instead of engorging from an algorithm. Sure, you can follow albums and artists but since you can't organize them, these features gets useless if you have anything more than 100 items. The UI is in general is way too simple, with very sparse information density compared to your traditional music player. Was it because of necessity or style that all these previous tools opted for all these features Spotify shirks? I'll let you decide that.

fbnlsr 4y ago

> And we can not even directly compare a MP3 player to Spotify, which is paid to do an entirely different and way more complicated job, considering that you are able to browse and organize a completely different and incomparably larger (and automatically growing) set of media. Spotify has two drawbacks though: you need a constant Internet connection and it removes tracks at will. The constant internet connection can be solved by downloading media to the device, but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing. This is the reason I keep buying CDs. Spotify is an amazing tool to listen on the go but whenever I feel a real connection (no pun intended) with an artist's music, I have to buy their art in a physical format.

dmitriid 4y ago
> but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing. Blame the copyright holders aka the Big Four/Big Five: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry Streaming services would gladly stream anything you want to you.
- mosselman 4y ago
  That is still a downside of the system. Even when there is some external force at play. The BigFour/Big Five don't come into your house to take away your CDs.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Who is to blame is irrelevant.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Nah, I'll just blame Spotify. There are services that let you download to your local storage, whatever you buy from them. Bandcamp is the obvious example, but in the past there was eMusic and even iTunes. Spotify could do it, but they just don't want to. How else are they going to help themselves to your wallet every month? Sure streaming services want to give me anything I desire...anyhting except allow me to download an audio file that I can keep on my system. Then I wouldn't have to give a crap about whether Spotify still had the rights to it.

bartread 4y ago

> MP3 player UX has ever been comparable to what Spotify offers nowadays. You might have different experiences to me. My iPod was never a distraction whilst driving in the way that Spotify, with it's manifold failure modes and inconsistent/unresponsive UX, can be. With depressing regularity I drive without either music or podcasts because that's preferable to dying (or killing someone else) in a car crash because I'm fussing with Spotify after it's crapped out in some weird way yet again. Again, not a problem I ever had with my iPod. I know they do crash occasionally - happened to a friend - but I can't remember a single incident in the 7 - 8 years I used mine regularly (multiple hours, every day) where it crashed. Spotify is terrible software to the point of being dangerous. I can't see how that is desirable UX.

projektfu 4y ago
I find Apple Music to be pretty good except in CarPlay where the features that ostensibly make driving safer make it more dangerous. If I'm parked, I have access to the whole collection. If I'm moving, there's a tiny fraction available, or I can use Siri to try to get what I want. If course, Siri is stuck on one language at a time and my collection has many, some of which I can't even pronounce. What could have been a quick scroll to find the album or artist I want becomes a frustrating experience in finding something acceptable for the mood. I'll agree that people with early iPods had an easy time finding their music. If you truly love recommendation engines, that old style is not for you. But it would be nice to have the same interface on CarPlay for the rest of us.
jstummbillig 4y ago
> You might have different experiences to me. Definitely. Your experience does sound demoralizing. I am not sure I have had Spotify crash on me thus far and certainly not with any regularity. I think it's safe to assume that you have an untypically bad experience, because if what you described was true for most people, Spotify would have no users. Which begs the question, why do you stick to it? There are competing services. How could they possibly do a worse job, in light of what you are describing?
- criddell 4y ago

layer8 4y ago

The ability of such players to be operated blindly, and to give audio feedback on operations, is a major advantage. Then also the pocketability, compared to today’s huge phones. Lastly, being distraction-free because they are dedicated to sound file playback. No internet, no ads, no hit-and-miss recommendations, no connection issues. Just play what you know you have and like. It’s a simpler life where you have full control.

pier25 4y ago

Spotify has an opportunity here to sell a hi quality portable player with a good DAC and headphones amp. It's obviously a niche product, but if they started streaming in FLAC and paired it with their own audiophile player, it would be a fantastic marketing stunt they would probably turn a profit by selling the devices. God knows what audiophiles do to be able to listen to audio on the go with a good DAC and amp.

lambic 4y ago

I want to listen to my music, the music I've bought, not what spotify throws at me. I'm currently using Youtube Music because it at least lets me store and play my music collection, even though it tries to push me toward the streaming options.

csdvrx 4y ago

> Well, I was hoping they would try to describe it, because personally, I would have to wear my most deeply shaded nostalgia glasses to Leaving aside the UI issues (most of which can be alleviated with hardware buttons having tactile indicators like bumps / different sizes etc), my core concern is you are leaving not just the preservation job (prey none of the albums/songs gets deleted after an IP right renegotiation) but the curation job to Spotify. I don't want that. Curation is the most important thing even. I carefully select the albums I want to listen to. I don't ever want software to try to guess my tastes or fill in the blanks when the playlist is over. It might be good for Spotify as they can show better stats (more tracks listened to, more engagement, whatever) but it's not for me as I'd rather have audio stop to let me take another decision about what I want to listen to: I care about my own experience much more than Spotify might.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

IgniteTheSun 4y ago

> I am mostly confused by what the author thinks the selling point is. ------------------- From the article: > You don’t need to use any special desktop software; you mount the Walkman as a USB storage device and transfer files. Wait… that’s it? Yes! >The player indexes any music you add, but keeps the files in place. This lets me use rsync to regularly diff and copy new ripped CDs or downloaded tracks across, even on FreeBSD. It also decouples syncing from music organising, so no more finagling iTunes in Wine, or using the garbage new macOS Music.app. As a (diagnosed) OCD suffer, this literally makes me happier than it should. ---------- These are features I had in my MP3 player about the time the first iPod came out (looked like a thumbdrive with a couple of buttons and a 2-line LCD screen on its side). Features I highly prefer, along with the fact that no internet connection is required at any time. I'm not looking for a device to be the front end for Spotify, Apple, or any other service - just an MP3 player that lets me play podcasts, music, lectures, etc. - e.g., any audio file that I want to, ideally in most of the common audio formats (including ogg). [Edited for format.]