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Spotify's most recent update has ruined a lot of things for a lot of people - you're not alone. I've had repeated conversations with Spotify Support about the v

Spotify's most recent update has ruined a lot of things for a lot of people - you're not alone. I've had repeated conversations with Spotify Support about the various things the update destroys, and they have made it clear they will not escalate any requests in a way that involves letting me (or anyone, presumably) speak with an actaul developer - though they will say they've "forward[ed] your ideas to the dev team" if you complain enough. Sorry :(

endianswap 12y ago
Yeah, similar frustrating experiences here led me to cancel my spotify premium subscription today and try Google play music, which apparently has all but one of the albums I regularly listen to. Normally that'd bother me but Google lets you upload your own songs and they're treated like first class songs, so I'm super happy with my choice.
- adyus 12y ago
  Caveat emptor. There's no native desktop apps for Google Music, nor do they have an API for future integrations. On OS X, give Radiant Player a try. I tried switching to Spotify but had a hard time moving playlists. More than half my songs were not found on Spotify.
mfrieswyk 12y ago
I'm sure the support agents you've been speaking to are just saying what they've been asked to say. Let's not kill the messenger here. This is likely a decision that is way above theirs and most of their developers' pay grades unfortunately.
- ivraatiems 12y ago
  Oh, yes, absolutely, and I treat them with politeness. However, the fact there's no transparent procedure to escalate to anywhere above the regular support staff (even to a support supervisor) is indicative of Spotify's overall disinterest in caring for its customers.
lt 12y ago
Just curious - what has it ruined? I use the free version, and while I noticed it is a bit different since a few weeks, didn't really notice anything that would bother me.
- fowkswe 12y ago
  They removed support for 3rd party apps. This devastated me as it was the best music discovery service I've found (KCRW Music Mine and Pitchfork in particular). It also removed the 'search' (command + F) in the song list. I could see them not wanting to support poorly created apps, but removing the last one boggles my mind.
  - elecboy 12y ago
    At first I thought my spotify was strange, because I was trying to look in my playlist and a few minutes of searching today I discover they removed that feature in the new version and right now the only way to get it back is to download and old version, my questions is why did they have to remove this, and they have done this in other times. edit: I am talking about the search in playlist (command + F)
  - SamuelKillin 12y ago
    The lack of command + F frustrates me roughly 15 times a day.
- pgwhalen 12y ago
  The autohotkey script that pops up when you google "spotify autohotkey" broke, and that pretty much prevented me from listening at work for a week. Very annoying to not have a quick way to stop my music when a coworker taps me on the shoulder.
  - madeofpalk 12y ago
    Just buy a Mac - there's a play/pause button on the keyboard!
  - bitsofpancake 12y ago
mhomde 12y ago
That you no longer can sort by popularity AFAIK any longer is mindboggling, although even before you had to know about the "spotify:search: syntax. Seems like a very common scenario they don't support any longer, for technical reasons? for not wanting people to listen to music that way?
j42 12y ago
I really, really hope at least one of their devs reads HN. You guys are great. From a UX standpoint, I get what you're going for. As a marketer, it makes sense. And as a developer, I can honestly say 1.0.2.6 wouldn't come CLOSE to qualifying as a gold master, let alone something you pushed out to millions of people. The "bugs": 1) Rendering. Composite views in the app take 1-2s to render on an 8-core Xeon and a T1 line--I've seen much better performance from React which is DOM-based, so what gives? Are you firing synchronous API calls before loading the resources?? 2) Local Files. More below under "personal grievances," but I consider this a bug for two reasons: first, you cannot sort by date added or adjust columns in any meaningful way. Second, it's not scanning local directories properly because plenty of local music found in "Songs" is missing from this view. 3) Hover states. Dear god, hover states. If you actually are coding this native, then you've got something weird going on with your first responder, layering, or a timer somewhere because drag selection states are buggy everywhere. Songs, playlists, and starred. Play around with this and you'll notice how something keeps interrupting the current layer event. 4) Play bar. I don't know if you changed the protocol on the local server responsible for actually streaming, or if you shifted over to some event/dispatch structure, but I'm getting a 1s delay and surprising lag on the play bar. Not exactly sure of the culprit, but it makes it very difficult to quickly drag and scan. To clarify again--this is not related to the network. Probably related to buffers and however current_position is reconciled. 5) Spotify Helper. Did I mention it's eating up 100% CPU on one core consistently? Whatever you're doing on the rendering side with bindings is foobar. I get this 50% of the time launching the app. Yes, I've run disk utility, verified and repaired permissions and the primary sector. And my RAM (and VRAM) is fine. https://gist.github.com/j42/e11c0a2f5ee4d288cb31 https://gist.github.com/j42/e11c0a2f5ee4d288cb31 6) A little one. When creating a new playlist and the artist + album fields are all uniform, it should auto-populate the playlist title. Not a big deal, but worth noting. On to the "personal gripes," or "dark patterns." I get why you're doing it, but I don't like it: 1) You can't hide the social bar. I realize you want people to use the feature, but why not turn it on by default and still LEAVE the option to hide it in the 'advanced' section of preferences most people never visit anyway? 2) Local files are treated as second rate. Worse still, as mentioned above the local files view is actually broken. But even going through search and songs, trying to work with any kind of local media has become a pain in the ass. For what it's worth, the API seems very well designed and as a whole the ecosystem has traditionally worked quite well. Especially when handing off streams between multiple devices and/or protocols. I'll stick with my subscription for the time being, but can someone with actual clout take these issues seriously rather than just echoing the same old "we'll notify the devs, thanks for your suggestion!"
cozzyd 12y ago
Why not use Spotify with a third-party player like Clementine? (Although maybe that's not allowed for free subscriptions?)
- rikkus 12y ago
  I just discovered Clementine and was quite excited that it would let me play Spotify, but it keeps stopping part way through a track and skipping to the next.
  - cozzyd 12y ago
    Yeah, that does happen to me too occasionally, and I'm not sure why. I wonder if it's Clementine's fault or the binary blob.
sgloutnikov 12y ago
I am still amazed how they pushed out this "update" to millions of customers. It removes so many key features. I had to downgrade to 0.9.15.27. If anyone wants to do the same here are Windows instructions: - Uninstall current Spotify - Grab the old version and install it: http://www.filehorse.com/download-spotify/old-versions http://www.filehorse.com/download-spotify/old-versions - Stop Sptofiy from auto updating create 2 read-only files (blank txt for example) named 'Spotify_new' and 'Spotify_new.exe.sig' in C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Roaming\Spotify

endianswap 12y ago

Yeah, similar frustrating experiences here led me to cancel my spotify premium subscription today and try Google play music, which apparently has all but one of the albums I regularly listen to. Normally that'd bother me but Google lets you upload your own songs and they're treated like first class songs, so I'm super happy with my choice.

adyus 12y ago
Caveat emptor. There's no native desktop apps for Google Music, nor do they have an API for future integrations. On OS X, give Radiant Player a try. I tried switching to Spotify but had a hard time moving playlists. More than half my songs were not found on Spotify.

mfrieswyk 12y ago

I'm sure the support agents you've been speaking to are just saying what they've been asked to say. Let's not kill the messenger here. This is likely a decision that is way above theirs and most of their developers' pay grades unfortunately.

ivraatiems 12y ago
Oh, yes, absolutely, and I treat them with politeness. However, the fact there's no transparent procedure to escalate to anywhere above the regular support staff (even to a support supervisor) is indicative of Spotify's overall disinterest in caring for its customers.

lt 12y ago

Just curious - what has it ruined? I use the free version, and while I noticed it is a bit different since a few weeks, didn't really notice anything that would bother me.

fowkswe 12y ago
They removed support for 3rd party apps. This devastated me as it was the best music discovery service I've found (KCRW Music Mine and Pitchfork in particular). It also removed the 'search' (command + F) in the song list. I could see them not wanting to support poorly created apps, but removing the last one boggles my mind.
- elecboy 12y ago
  At first I thought my spotify was strange, because I was trying to look in my playlist and a few minutes of searching today I discover they removed that feature in the new version and right now the only way to get it back is to download and old version, my questions is why did they have to remove this, and they have done this in other times. edit: I am talking about the search in playlist (command + F)
- SamuelKillin 12y ago
  The lack of command + F frustrates me roughly 15 times a day.
pgwhalen 12y ago
The autohotkey script that pops up when you google "spotify autohotkey" broke, and that pretty much prevented me from listening at work for a week. Very annoying to not have a quick way to stop my music when a coworker taps me on the shoulder.
- madeofpalk 12y ago
  Just buy a Mac - there's a play/pause button on the keyboard!
- bitsofpancake 12y ago

mhomde 12y ago

That you no longer can sort by popularity AFAIK any longer is mindboggling, although even before you had to know about the "spotify:search: syntax. Seems like a very common scenario they don't support any longer, for technical reasons? for not wanting people to listen to music that way?

j42 12y ago

I really, really hope at least one of their devs reads HN. You guys are great. From a UX standpoint, I get what you're going for. As a marketer, it makes sense. And as a developer, I can honestly say 1.0.2.6 wouldn't come CLOSE to qualifying as a gold master, let alone something you pushed out to millions of people. The "bugs": 1) Rendering. Composite views in the app take 1-2s to render on an 8-core Xeon and a T1 line--I've seen much better performance from React which is DOM-based, so what gives? Are you firing synchronous API calls before loading the resources?? 2) Local Files. More below under "personal grievances," but I consider this a bug for two reasons: first, you cannot sort by date added or adjust columns in any meaningful way. Second, it's not scanning local directories properly because plenty of local music found in "Songs" is missing from this view. 3) Hover states. Dear god, hover states. If you actually are coding this native, then you've got something weird going on with your first responder, layering, or a timer somewhere because drag selection states are buggy everywhere. Songs, playlists, and starred. Play around with this and you'll notice how something keeps interrupting the current layer event. 4) Play bar. I don't know if you changed the protocol on the local server responsible for actually streaming, or if you shifted over to some event/dispatch structure, but I'm getting a 1s delay and surprising lag on the play bar. Not exactly sure of the culprit, but it makes it very difficult to quickly drag and scan. To clarify again--this is not related to the network. Probably related to buffers and however current_position is reconciled. 5) Spotify Helper. Did I mention it's eating up 100% CPU on one core consistently? Whatever you're doing on the rendering side with bindings is foobar. I get this 50% of the time launching the app. Yes, I've run disk utility, verified and repaired permissions and the primary sector. And my RAM (and VRAM) is fine. https://gist.github.com/j42/e11c0a2f5ee4d288cb31 https://gist.github.com/j42/e11c0a2f5ee4d288cb31 6) A little one. When creating a new playlist and the artist + album fields are all uniform, it should auto-populate the playlist title. Not a big deal, but worth noting. On to the "personal gripes," or "dark patterns." I get why you're doing it, but I don't like it: 1) You can't hide the social bar. I realize you want people to use the feature, but why not turn it on by default and still LEAVE the option to hide it in the 'advanced' section of preferences most people never visit anyway? 2) Local files are treated as second rate. Worse still, as mentioned above the local files view is actually broken. But even going through search and songs, trying to work with any kind of local media has become a pain in the ass. For what it's worth, the API seems very well designed and as a whole the ecosystem has traditionally worked quite well. Especially when handing off streams between multiple devices and/or protocols. I'll stick with my subscription for the time being, but can someone with actual clout take these issues seriously rather than just echoing the same old "we'll notify the devs, thanks for your suggestion!"

cozzyd 12y ago

Why not use Spotify with a third-party player like Clementine? (Although maybe that's not allowed for free subscriptions?)

rikkus 12y ago
I just discovered Clementine and was quite excited that it would let me play Spotify, but it keeps stopping part way through a track and skipping to the next.
- cozzyd 12y ago
  Yeah, that does happen to me too occasionally, and I'm not sure why. I wonder if it's Clementine's fault or the binary blob.

sgloutnikov 12y ago

I am still amazed how they pushed out this "update" to millions of customers. It removes so many key features. I had to downgrade to 0.9.15.27. If anyone wants to do the same here are Windows instructions: - Uninstall current Spotify - Grab the old version and install it: http://www.filehorse.com/download-spotify/old-versions http://www.filehorse.com/download-spotify/old-versions - Stop Sptofiy from auto updating create 2 read-only files (blank txt for example) named 'Spotify_new' and 'Spotify_new.exe.sig' in C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Roaming\Spotify