4 ms·

> 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 (a

by 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.
  - Toreno96 4y ago
    > you can only have playlist of songs. There's no way to collapse songs of a single album to one entry. You could add the whole albums to the playlist, one by one, and then play the playlist w/ shuffle disabled. This last bit makes it a limited workaround, however. On the other hand, Spotify API could allow to implement the custom solution to shuffle these, similar to https://spotifyshuffler.com/ https://spotifyshuffler.com/, if you have enough skills, time, and determination to do that.
    - cropcirclbureau 4y ago
      I'm not using the playlists as a list of songs to listen to in one session. These are issues that come to the fore when you start using them as an organizational primitive. It's more limited than you think in that sense. For example, let's say I have a 20 album playlist. A very usual affair for me as I compile a single playlist for one month or a season. 20 albums comes around at 200 files. That's an ungodly amount of scrolling right there. (my seasonal/monthly actually average around 50 albums). Now imagine how painful it'd be for my long running playlists with hundreds or even that one playlist of mine with thousands of albums? One workaround that I and other users make use of is to just add the first track of albums as links to the albums themselves. It's whatever. It's a bit stupid this is something I have to fucking deal with in the biggest music interface that the planet makes use of. Anyways, I mainly mentioned that as example of the ethos of Spotify UI/UX and what kinds of user they're primarily catering to. I guess I'm in the excluded group in this implementation of "worse-is-better" or something. (Is there a term for that group? Power user can't cover it because people with disabilities are usually in it.)
hnlmorg 4y ago
Having grown up in an era when cassette walkmans were new, then salivating over CD walkmans before building my own MP3 player in the mid-00's, I think smart phones are the best thing to happen to portable music. Like yourself, I do also listen to full albums. You can do that on Spotify very easily. You can listen to recommendations (either via Spotify's own suggestion engine or curated playlists) of music from genre's, region, era, etc too. Sure you cannot add your own mixes to Spotify but the beauty of smart phones is that I can use a different app for that (and as an ex-DJ I really am into listing to DJ sets so I very much to use my phone in that capacity). And this is really the point of the GPs comment. It wasn't that Spotify (specifically) replaces the need for a walkman but rather that smart phones support an array of more convenient ways to consume music with Spotify as one example. If you don't like Spotify then that's fine because we all have our own personal preferences. But you're not just limited to Spotify on a smart phone.
- csdvrx 4y ago
  > Like yourself, I do also listen to full albums. You can do that on Spotify very easily Can you load into Spotify a very specific recoding that's rarely available? I have a few CDs hard to source from rare live recordings. If you just want to listen to background music, or a given song from a given bad, sure. If you want to listen to a specific recording that happened at a given date for which you have the CD, I don't think Spotify can do that. > I think smart phones are the best thing to happen to portable music. If they had hardware buttons, yes, but that's rarely found. Also, the DAC is rarely any good (less of a problem now that LDAC and AptXhd are becoming popular). Are these hardware buttons and a good DAC worth $400 to $4000? Maybe not to you, but they are worth that for me.
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    > Can you load into Spotify a very specific recoding that's rarely available? I have a few CDs hard to source from rare live recordings. Weirdly, yes you can. I stumbled across that option myself on the desktop client when search for a song that wasn’t in Spotify’s catalogue. > If you just want to listen to background music, or a given song from a given bad, sure. If you want to listen to a specific recording that happened at a given date for which you have the CD, I don't think Spotify can do that. It can, but you really don’t need to use Spotify if you don’t want to. I still keep Subsonic around for exactly this kind of scenario (and podcasts too). So I use Spotify for 90% of my listening but Subsonic for anything I’ve curated myself from physical media. > If they had hardware buttons, yes, but that's rarely found. All smart phone has hardware volume buttons. My Bluetooth earphones have hardware play and pause buttons. And the device we are comparing it against (the new Sony Walkman) is also touchscreen based like smart phones. So there isn’t really anything between modern Walkmans and smart phones these days. > Are these hardware buttons and a good DAC worth $400 to $4000? Maybe not to you, but they are worth that for me. You have no idea how much I’ve spent on audio hardware so please don’t assume I cheap out and don’t care about audio quality. In my home office alone I have an entire rack full of professional grade hardware. But I’m also pragmatic about what I buy. A £400 MP3 player isn’t going to sound any better than an iPhone when I’m listening to lossy music. The real differentiator there is what (ear|head)phones I use. However when I am sat at home my vinyl collection, I notice all the nuances of cheaper hardware much more.

by atoav 4y ago

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.
- Toreno96 4y ago
  > you can only have playlist of songs. There's no way to collapse songs of a single album to one entry. You could add the whole albums to the playlist, one by one, and then play the playlist w/ shuffle disabled. This last bit makes it a limited workaround, however. On the other hand, Spotify API could allow to implement the custom solution to shuffle these, similar to https://spotifyshuffler.com/ https://spotifyshuffler.com/, if you have enough skills, time, and determination to do that.
  - cropcirclbureau 4y ago
    I'm not using the playlists as a list of songs to listen to in one session. These are issues that come to the fore when you start using them as an organizational primitive. It's more limited than you think in that sense. For example, let's say I have a 20 album playlist. A very usual affair for me as I compile a single playlist for one month or a season. 20 albums comes around at 200 files. That's an ungodly amount of scrolling right there. (my seasonal/monthly actually average around 50 albums). Now imagine how painful it'd be for my long running playlists with hundreds or even that one playlist of mine with thousands of albums? One workaround that I and other users make use of is to just add the first track of albums as links to the albums themselves. It's whatever. It's a bit stupid this is something I have to fucking deal with in the biggest music interface that the planet makes use of. Anyways, I mainly mentioned that as example of the ethos of Spotify UI/UX and what kinds of user they're primarily catering to. I guess I'm in the excluded group in this implementation of "worse-is-better" or something. (Is there a term for that group? Power user can't cover it because people with disabilities are usually in it.)

hnlmorg 4y ago

Having grown up in an era when cassette walkmans were new, then salivating over CD walkmans before building my own MP3 player in the mid-00's, I think smart phones are the best thing to happen to portable music. Like yourself, I do also listen to full albums. You can do that on Spotify very easily. You can listen to recommendations (either via Spotify's own suggestion engine or curated playlists) of music from genre's, region, era, etc too. Sure you cannot add your own mixes to Spotify but the beauty of smart phones is that I can use a different app for that (and as an ex-DJ I really am into listing to DJ sets so I very much to use my phone in that capacity). And this is really the point of the GPs comment. It wasn't that Spotify (specifically) replaces the need for a walkman but rather that smart phones support an array of more convenient ways to consume music with Spotify as one example. If you don't like Spotify then that's fine because we all have our own personal preferences. But you're not just limited to Spotify on a smart phone.

csdvrx 4y ago
> Like yourself, I do also listen to full albums. You can do that on Spotify very easily Can you load into Spotify a very specific recoding that's rarely available? I have a few CDs hard to source from rare live recordings. If you just want to listen to background music, or a given song from a given bad, sure. If you want to listen to a specific recording that happened at a given date for which you have the CD, I don't think Spotify can do that. > I think smart phones are the best thing to happen to portable music. If they had hardware buttons, yes, but that's rarely found. Also, the DAC is rarely any good (less of a problem now that LDAC and AptXhd are becoming popular). Are these hardware buttons and a good DAC worth $400 to $4000? Maybe not to you, but they are worth that for me.
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  > Can you load into Spotify a very specific recoding that's rarely available? I have a few CDs hard to source from rare live recordings. Weirdly, yes you can. I stumbled across that option myself on the desktop client when search for a song that wasn’t in Spotify’s catalogue. > If you just want to listen to background music, or a given song from a given bad, sure. If you want to listen to a specific recording that happened at a given date for which you have the CD, I don't think Spotify can do that. It can, but you really don’t need to use Spotify if you don’t want to. I still keep Subsonic around for exactly this kind of scenario (and podcasts too). So I use Spotify for 90% of my listening but Subsonic for anything I’ve curated myself from physical media. > If they had hardware buttons, yes, but that's rarely found. All smart phone has hardware volume buttons. My Bluetooth earphones have hardware play and pause buttons. And the device we are comparing it against (the new Sony Walkman) is also touchscreen based like smart phones. So there isn’t really anything between modern Walkmans and smart phones these days. > Are these hardware buttons and a good DAC worth $400 to $4000? Maybe not to you, but they are worth that for me. You have no idea how much I’ve spent on audio hardware so please don’t assume I cheap out and don’t care about audio quality. In my home office alone I have an entire rack full of professional grade hardware. But I’m also pragmatic about what I buy. A £400 MP3 player isn’t going to sound any better than an iPhone when I’m listening to lossy music. The real differentiator there is what (ear|head)phones I use. However when I am sat at home my vinyl collection, I notice all the nuances of cheaper hardware much more.