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The Spotify desktop client has seen a massive regression since 2008 or 2009. It's incredible how they managed to make it so unresponsive. Scrolling in a playlis

The Spotify desktop client has seen a massive regression since 2008 or 2009. It's incredible how they managed to make it so unresponsive. Scrolling in a playlist is like playing a game at 10 fps. It's uncomfortable and not worth it. Ads are worse as well. I've seen countless malware ads in the bottom banner.

devicenull 11y ago
You also can't ctrl-f within a page, which makes finding things really annoying.
- cwyers 11y ago
  You USED to be able to. It's very annoying that that feature is gone.
  - nindalf 11y ago
    I can't say I've experienced any of the complaints about slowness that the other people have mentioned but this regression has really annoyed me. You could search for a song within a playlist and now you can't. I have no idea why they would remove it.
ploxiln 11y ago
... but (smart?) developer time is so expensive! and computers are so fast!
- drdaeman 11y ago
  I get it's sarcasm, but the problem is that computers are not so fast yet. Developer vs computer time trade-off works only when software already works reasonably well. Which is not the case.
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    Back in Windows 98 days, it took a few seconds to load a screen of a native app sometimes. Now our computers are orders of magnitude faster, and webapps can still take a few seconds to load a screen. Progress?
    - drdaeman 11y ago
      Both yes and no. The thing that hadn't changed is humans - it was and it's still acceptable for an application to take a second or another to load. Technical details had changed, but I can't really judge if those changes were drastically innovative or we're just redoing the same shit over and over, and can't tell if world has gone better or worse. I guess such judgements are highly subjective.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
AustinScript 11y ago
Hmm - I haven't really noticed any unresponsive-ness but I also am a paid subscriber, I wonder if the ads are responsible for the slowness? The spotify mobile app has some odd behavior from time to time. The UI will continue to respond to my actions but nothing actually happens for 20 seconds, during that time i'll click on several different songs attempting to get them to play. Finally, for whatever reason, the app springs back to life an begins to execute the actions out of some sort of queue leading to several songs playing. It seemed very odd to queue song plays in such manner. I would've assumed it would be last one wins rather than "Song 1" - play for 2 seconds "Song 2" - Play for 2 seconds "Song 3" - play for 2 seconds I may have clicked "Play song 2" 15 seconds ago before the song is actually played. Overall, I love spotify though. I use it everywhere.
- tobr 11y ago
  I've frequently been unable to pause or change the volume of the music for tens of seconds because the user interface stalled. Completely inexcusable for an app that is ostensibly for playing music. On the good side, since all the webviews are right there in the app as renamed zip files, I suppose they could easily be edited to cut out some of the bottlenecks?
- stevenjohns 11y ago
  Uses >400mb of RAM for me and constantly uses about 5-10% disk usage. It may very well be the ads responsible for at least a memory leak in my case.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Spotify and SoundCloud are testaments to how users will endure whatever awful UX you give them as long as they're getting enough value from your thing.
  - colordrops 11y ago
    The soundcloud mobile app is not that bad, at least on Android. It has the best audio scrubbing of any app I've used. The UI is super simple and made to work at a distance, e.g. while mounted in a card holder.
noxToken 11y ago
Add to that the massive start-up time for the Windows client. A fresh instance Spotify from a rebooted machine takes ages to gain full functionality. If you quit in the middle of a good playlist, most of the time you'll be able to continue playing from where that playlist left off. If you opened Spotify to find a song or move to another playlist, you'll be waiting a while. I just started Spotify with a stopwatch: 2:26 for the main Browse to completely render 2:42 for the live search window to give suggestions 2:52 (+10 seconds) for the search to return a result I once thought it was because of the massive local library that had to be loaded and sorted into Spotify, but I've done away with local files to try to speed up the start up. The results on my laptop are not any better. Maybe it's because I've been updating the same client since 2012?
- 1_player 11y ago
  Wow.. I agree that Spotify isn't the most lightweight application, but it doesn't feel much heavier than, say, Chrome on my Linux installation. Are you on a mechanical hard drive perhaps? The network performance though is quite bad, searching for some song often fails or just is very slow to load and render.
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    Should a music player be anywhere near as heavy as Chrome? A web browser is a pretty immensely complicated thing (CSS, DOM rendering, Javascript JIT compiler, etc.). Similar criticisms have been made of iTunes over the years (though I find it's not bad in the current version). Things like laggy scrolling are a bit understandable there, since they've defaulted to the grid of album covers view for a while. But Spotify looks like it's all just columns of text and a few thumbnails on the side?
    - 91bananas 11y ago
      I assume this thing is just a web app rendered in their "browser"? So doesn't it need to do all the things you list? Needs css to layout the DOM, needs to parse and execute javascript. I'm a recent convert from grooveshark, so I've been using the spotlight web player and I find it a pretty nice web app to be honest. I haven't dealt with any of the actual desktop clients yet, so don't know if anything I said above is true.
madsushi 11y ago
The recent removal of the system tray icon is anti-user. It provided users with easy access to Play/Pause from the system tray, but that meant users spent less time in the app, so the system tray icon was removed completely.
- conradfr 11y ago
  Infuriating. It's 2015 and my Winamp is still more usable than a "new" music player. Why do they care if I spend more or less time in the app if I'm a premium user, surely that can't be the reason for this regression.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    Winamp is just the best piece of software ever written, ever. I still lament the fact that it doesn't run properly on Linux.
    - pen2l 11y ago
      xmms, audacious, etc. When I went from win -> nix so many years, all I wanted was a music player with the interface that of winamp2. xmms gave that and I was happy. But then I discovered mpd+ncmpcpp. Really great if you have large music collections, have been using it since.
      - StavrosK 11y ago
        Ah, thank you. ncmpcpp looks great (and I imagine I can connect it to an mpd instance running on a separate computer), but it's really important for me to not have a window in my alt+tab list. I'll try XMMS, I have tried it before but it never "clicked". I'll give it another shot, thanks!
        pen2l 11y ago
        It's so weird for me to be talking like this. You see, I was a very avid fan of winamp(2) about 10 years ago. Nothing else came close. Then onto linux, xmms did the trick (as all I needed was a winamp2 replacement). Then as my collection grew, my priorities change, I was after speed. So mpd was thing. In the past few years I haven't had a personal collection, now it's more often listening to music on grooveshark/youtube. After grooveshark went down, I got spotify (paid subscription), and I find myself being _stunned_ how bad, how slow, how ugly, how anti-UX it is. I think I may go back to having the collection on my HDD once again with mpd as that is still really fast. But that'll be difficult, as I'm often on the go and want to listen to stuff on my cell phone (where spotify is okay actually).
beachstartup 11y ago
the mobile app has several modes in which it'll stop playback, and you need to pull it out of your pocket, and hit buttons or re-select your damn playlist before it starts your music again. also really simple shit like 'random or 'repeat' are impossible to find. which is pretty much a giant fucking failure for a mobile app that's used by people in the car, bluetooth, people on the go, etc. i wish i could say mobile itunes stayed useable, but it didn't either. we're basically choosing from the worst of the best, these days.
lobster_johnson 11y ago
They did a refresh recently (just a few weeks ago) that installed a new renderer both for the playlist content view and for the playlist list view. That resulted in a big performance boost, at least on my Core i7 MacBook Pro. With older machines I can guess that the performance might still not be that good. However, this refresh also removed the ability to filter the playlist content view (cmd+F). The worst part of losing that feature is trying to find stuff in "Local Files". Very awkward.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
techofdoom 11y ago
But, its using JS! FTW! That's awesome right, I mean, those awesome "devs" managed to take a sucky browser tech, and drag down a native app by insisting on shoving in there. I think they should have inserted Node as well, and Go, and Rust, just because.
task_queue 11y ago
When the industry props you up as the only avenue for access to a large collection of streaming music, you don't have to compete on terms of stability, usability or features anymore.
Nemcue 11y ago
Paying for Spotify has been like being in a relationship with a partner that is slowly letting themselves go. "Oh, you've.. you've redesigned? Yeah no — it's.. it's kind of dark don't you think? ... no-no, I like it honey." "Playlist-search isn't there anymore? Oh, ok.. :|" "Hey, some of my songs aren't playing anymore, do you know anything about that? No.. ?" "My offline-playlist is showing me a spinner instead of playing.. sigh, no it's fine, I'll just dig up my old mp3's in the garage." At this point I'm seriously considering a divorce.

devicenull 11y ago

You also can't ctrl-f within a page, which makes finding things really annoying.

cwyers 11y ago
You USED to be able to. It's very annoying that that feature is gone.
- nindalf 11y ago
  I can't say I've experienced any of the complaints about slowness that the other people have mentioned but this regression has really annoyed me. You could search for a song within a playlist and now you can't. I have no idea why they would remove it.

ploxiln 11y ago

... but (smart?) developer time is so expensive! and computers are so fast!

drdaeman 11y ago
I get it's sarcasm, but the problem is that computers are not so fast yet. Developer vs computer time trade-off works only when software already works reasonably well. Which is not the case.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Back in Windows 98 days, it took a few seconds to load a screen of a native app sometimes. Now our computers are orders of magnitude faster, and webapps can still take a few seconds to load a screen. Progress?
  - drdaeman 11y ago
    Both yes and no. The thing that hadn't changed is humans - it was and it's still acceptable for an application to take a second or another to load. Technical details had changed, but I can't really judge if those changes were drastically innovative or we're just redoing the same shit over and over, and can't tell if world has gone better or worse. I guess such judgements are highly subjective.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

AustinScript 11y ago

Hmm - I haven't really noticed any unresponsive-ness but I also am a paid subscriber, I wonder if the ads are responsible for the slowness? The spotify mobile app has some odd behavior from time to time. The UI will continue to respond to my actions but nothing actually happens for 20 seconds, during that time i'll click on several different songs attempting to get them to play. Finally, for whatever reason, the app springs back to life an begins to execute the actions out of some sort of queue leading to several songs playing. It seemed very odd to queue song plays in such manner. I would've assumed it would be last one wins rather than "Song 1" - play for 2 seconds "Song 2" - Play for 2 seconds "Song 3" - play for 2 seconds I may have clicked "Play song 2" 15 seconds ago before the song is actually played. Overall, I love spotify though. I use it everywhere.

tobr 11y ago
I've frequently been unable to pause or change the volume of the music for tens of seconds because the user interface stalled. Completely inexcusable for an app that is ostensibly for playing music. On the good side, since all the webviews are right there in the app as renamed zip files, I suppose they could easily be edited to cut out some of the bottlenecks?
stevenjohns 11y ago
Uses >400mb of RAM for me and constantly uses about 5-10% disk usage. It may very well be the ads responsible for at least a memory leak in my case.
seanp2k2 11y ago
Spotify and SoundCloud are testaments to how users will endure whatever awful UX you give them as long as they're getting enough value from your thing.
- colordrops 11y ago
  The soundcloud mobile app is not that bad, at least on Android. It has the best audio scrubbing of any app I've used. The UI is super simple and made to work at a distance, e.g. while mounted in a card holder.

noxToken 11y ago

Add to that the massive start-up time for the Windows client. A fresh instance Spotify from a rebooted machine takes ages to gain full functionality. If you quit in the middle of a good playlist, most of the time you'll be able to continue playing from where that playlist left off. If you opened Spotify to find a song or move to another playlist, you'll be waiting a while. I just started Spotify with a stopwatch: 2:26 for the main Browse to completely render 2:42 for the live search window to give suggestions 2:52 (+10 seconds) for the search to return a result I once thought it was because of the massive local library that had to be loaded and sorted into Spotify, but I've done away with local files to try to speed up the start up. The results on my laptop are not any better. Maybe it's because I've been updating the same client since 2012?

1_player 11y ago
Wow.. I agree that Spotify isn't the most lightweight application, but it doesn't feel much heavier than, say, Chrome on my Linux installation. Are you on a mechanical hard drive perhaps? The network performance though is quite bad, searching for some song often fails or just is very slow to load and render.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  Should a music player be anywhere near as heavy as Chrome? A web browser is a pretty immensely complicated thing (CSS, DOM rendering, Javascript JIT compiler, etc.). Similar criticisms have been made of iTunes over the years (though I find it's not bad in the current version). Things like laggy scrolling are a bit understandable there, since they've defaulted to the grid of album covers view for a while. But Spotify looks like it's all just columns of text and a few thumbnails on the side?
  - 91bananas 11y ago
    I assume this thing is just a web app rendered in their "browser"? So doesn't it need to do all the things you list? Needs css to layout the DOM, needs to parse and execute javascript. I'm a recent convert from grooveshark, so I've been using the spotlight web player and I find it a pretty nice web app to be honest. I haven't dealt with any of the actual desktop clients yet, so don't know if anything I said above is true.

madsushi 11y ago

The recent removal of the system tray icon is anti-user. It provided users with easy access to Play/Pause from the system tray, but that meant users spent less time in the app, so the system tray icon was removed completely.

conradfr 11y ago
Infuriating. It's 2015 and my Winamp is still more usable than a "new" music player. Why do they care if I spend more or less time in the app if I'm a premium user, surely that can't be the reason for this regression.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  Winamp is just the best piece of software ever written, ever. I still lament the fact that it doesn't run properly on Linux.
  - pen2l 11y ago
    xmms, audacious, etc. When I went from win -> nix so many years, all I wanted was a music player with the interface that of winamp2. xmms gave that and I was happy. But then I discovered mpd+ncmpcpp. Really great if you have large music collections, have been using it since.
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      Ah, thank you. ncmpcpp looks great (and I imagine I can connect it to an mpd instance running on a separate computer), but it's really important for me to not have a window in my alt+tab list. I'll try XMMS, I have tried it before but it never "clicked". I'll give it another shot, thanks!
      - pen2l 11y ago
        It's so weird for me to be talking like this. You see, I was a very avid fan of winamp(2) about 10 years ago. Nothing else came close. Then onto linux, xmms did the trick (as all I needed was a winamp2 replacement). Then as my collection grew, my priorities change, I was after speed. So mpd was thing. In the past few years I haven't had a personal collection, now it's more often listening to music on grooveshark/youtube. After grooveshark went down, I got spotify (paid subscription), and I find myself being _stunned_ how bad, how slow, how ugly, how anti-UX it is. I think I may go back to having the collection on my HDD once again with mpd as that is still really fast. But that'll be difficult, as I'm often on the go and want to listen to stuff on my cell phone (where spotify is okay actually).

beachstartup 11y ago

the mobile app has several modes in which it'll stop playback, and you need to pull it out of your pocket, and hit buttons or re-select your damn playlist before it starts your music again. also really simple shit like 'random or 'repeat' are impossible to find. which is pretty much a giant fucking failure for a mobile app that's used by people in the car, bluetooth, people on the go, etc. i wish i could say mobile itunes stayed useable, but it didn't either. we're basically choosing from the worst of the best, these days.

lobster_johnson 11y ago

They did a refresh recently (just a few weeks ago) that installed a new renderer both for the playlist content view and for the playlist list view. That resulted in a big performance boost, at least on my Core i7 MacBook Pro. With older machines I can guess that the performance might still not be that good. However, this refresh also removed the ability to filter the playlist content view (cmd+F). The worst part of losing that feature is trying to find stuff in "Local Files". Very awkward.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

techofdoom 11y ago

But, its using JS! FTW! That's awesome right, I mean, those awesome "devs" managed to take a sucky browser tech, and drag down a native app by insisting on shoving in there. I think they should have inserted Node as well, and Go, and Rust, just because.

task_queue 11y ago

When the industry props you up as the only avenue for access to a large collection of streaming music, you don't have to compete on terms of stability, usability or features anymore.

Nemcue 11y ago

Paying for Spotify has been like being in a relationship with a partner that is slowly letting themselves go. "Oh, you've.. you've redesigned? Yeah no — it's.. it's kind of dark don't you think? ... no-no, I like it honey." "Playlist-search isn't there anymore? Oh, ok.. :|" "Hey, some of my songs aren't playing anymore, do you know anything about that? No.. ?" "My offline-playlist is showing me a spinner instead of playing.. sigh, no it's fine, I'll just dig up my old mp3's in the garage." At this point I'm seriously considering a divorce.