Give us your feedback - 0.9.0

[Richard]

Hey everyone,

Following on from our previous thread on 0.8.8, we've started up this thread to gather feedback from you on 0.9.0.

We want to hear what you love, what you hate, and any other emotions you have towards the app.

You'll find a list of everything that's changed in the app in our release notes here. And we'll be keeping this post updated with the changes we're making, along with where you can give us further feedback.

What we've changed:

1. The app should be a lot quicker now. So if you were affected by any slow behaviour previously, this shouldn't be an issue any more.

2. Clicking anywhere in the Now Playing box, rather than just the album art, will bring you straight to the song. This was reported here.

Where you can give us further feedback with your comments and kudos:

1. Change the white interface [we're currently reaching to users about this directly]

2. Changes to the activity feed -

     i. Bring back the old activity feed

     ii. The Favourites feature

     iii.Greater control of content in the feed: 

3. Bring back the total playlst length:

4. Filter option on artist pages

5. Go back to the old artist layout 

6. Ability to view all Facebook friends in the Follow tab:

7. View all playlist followers: 

8. Block/Remove followers 

9. Separate artists and friends

10. Remove 'who to follow'

11. Revert the font back to the original size (or provide an option to do so)

12. Restore 'View as Album List'

Thanks for all your support. We appreciate that there are a lot of changes going on at the moment and it can be a bumpy road at times. But we're confident that you'll like where we're going.

All your opinions matter and go into making Spotify the best product it can be. Keep it coming!

[AbsolutelyNoFB]

@Rollo_

I used to think that FLAC would be bandwidth prohibitive and then I read a report about Google Fiber. It turns out, in the US, that Internet capable fiber is vastly underutilized. Which is one of the reasons Google can offer such a good price on gigabit connections. Outside of the US, there are many countries that offer superb bandwidth that is more than capable of supporting FLAC.

Even on mobile, LTE is giving many people 5-50Mbits down. Now the bandwidth caps in the US are crazy, but that is what offline mode is for, right? I think this is what you were implying with local playback support.

At this point, the only real impediment to FLAC streaming is Hollywood and their dumb fetish for DRM. As some number of small labels sell FLAC versions of their catalogues, it could be that Spotify would initially offer FLAC streaming of a specialized catalogue and then expand over time. The people who want high quality streaming will pay. And Hollywood likes money.

In short, we can't get stuck with old beliefs otherwise nothing will get better.

[brandAnonymous]

mutantdog, I updated my crashing 8.5 from your 8.7 link, so thanks.

also, thanks to denniselvis for reporting acceptable performance from 8.7.

[AbsolutelyNoFB]

@silbaco

Big record labels own ~20% of Spotify. This means pretty much everything is negotiable, especially new licenses. If high quality streaming is good for their investment in Spotify, it can happen. At any price.

I'm not saying it's all easy, but if much smaller services such as WIMP are doing it, I see no reason why Spotify can't do it.

[brandAnonymous]

AbsolutelyNoFB, thanks for interacting with me on the spotify community! I was ready to jump ship.

Wellllll, lets see what happens after I try to sync the outstanding 22 tracks with my 75kb connection!

[mutantdog]

I don't expect to see any kind of lossless streeming in the forseable future. The "we want FLAC" crowd is quite the minority. Sadly most people care very little about sound quality and would rather have convenience, consider how popular tapes were throughout the 80s when vinyl was superior. Consider also the number of people here talking of migrating to RDIO (192 VBR apparently) because of the interface alone or how popular youtube is as a music streaming provider.

Modern mastering employs a few techniques to reduce the obvious audio artefacts of MP3 compression, mostly rolling off the EQ above 16kHZ. This is sufficient for most people. Maybe in a few years things will change but for now the costs of storage and bandwidth still favour the use of lossy formats.

Either way, to my ears at least, 320 OGG is far superior to MP3.

[AbsolutelyNoFB]

@brandAnonymous

You're welcome 🙂 As I mentioned previously, I'm glad you got something going without a major hassle. It's no fun having a low speed Internet connection. Once upon a time I lived in a place in the mountains that had only a slow CDMA cellular data connection. And even for that to work somewhat reliably, I had to get a special antenna. So to some extent, I know where you're coming from 😉

As for jumping off ships... there is a little life left in the HMS Spotify. At least these old v0.8.7 and v.0.6.5 lifeboats are working pretty well for the moment 😉

[AbsolutelyNoFB]

@mutantdog

I think tapes were popular in part because they were portable. I don't think they made too many turntables for automobiles. And the Sony Walkman would have been somewhat less convenient if it had contained a turntable 😉

High quality audio is making a comeback. To my hears, I agree, Ogg's higher quality modes are better than any form of MP3, but I find FLAC and other lossless formats to be clearly superior to Ogg.

Before I started experimenting with Spotify, I listened to mostly FLAC music using foobar2000. I converted the FLAC to Apple's lossless codec for use on my iPhone and it was clearly superior to anything else on the phone, i.e. MP3, MP4, AAC, etc. Even today, when Spotify isn't working, I play back some of my lossless music on the iPhone and it's great... far better than Spotify's high quality Ogg mode. It does take up a lot of space, though. But with a new Android phone or tablet, I can easily use 64GB of music via an SD card.

[mutantdog]

If the audiophile community is a growing minority, it makes sense that a smaller company such as WIMP would want to hit this niche market in such an increasingly competitive business. I think its fair to say Spotify are going for the lowest common denominator approach so probably won't be that interested. Given Trent Reznor's history maybe Daisy will be the one to watch for any major advancement in audio quality, although considering Beats by Dre's history perhaps not.

[DennyEMufc]

Making do with this 087, but like many others say, this is only a couple of updates from the 850, and its lack of speed is very noticeable, but at least it still looks great ........

[BigKev57 · Accepted solution]

I was using 0.8.5 until this latest debacle. I tried 0.8.7 and have now moved to 0.6.5.  0.6.5 is like a F1 car compared to the Mercedes of 0.8.5 and 0.8.7. and the broken down lorry that is 0.9.0.

[tetsuo76]

---

@BigKev57 wrote:

I was using 0.8.5 until this latest debacle. I tried 0.8.7 and have now moved to 0.6.5.  0.6.5 is like a F1 car compared to the Mercedes of 0.8.5 and 0.8.7. and the broken down lorry that is 0.9.0.

---

0.9.0 is more like an abandoned Lada that has no engine or tires and it has ugly stickers all over it.

[D0m1n1C]

My facebook friends no longer show up. Why is this?

[recorddelahora]

You need to explicitly follow people to see what they are listening to.

Also, haven't had much success finding 0.8.7 for OS X. Anyone have a link if there even was a 0.8.7 for mac?

[Rollo_]

@ AbsolutelyNoFB

Google Fiber is a game changer.

[brandAnonymous]

Wow...is Google Fiber USA only? That is arena Google should be tussling in.

On Apr 17th Virgin Media started throttling upload speeds in the UK to the detriment of many folks who have their livelihood based on fast upload speeds. Seriously, in Cambridge, UK, we were getting a consistent 120kbps upload speed. Absolutely unacceptable. many folks very unhappy. Google fiber actually sounds inexpensive to me....if it functions as advertized.

thanks for the tip rollo_

[rymclarney8388]

who has the 0.8.7 link or is it in another thread.

I would like to use it. I am using 0.6.5 for now and working just fine but I really would like something similar to 0.8.5 as far as interface goes.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks everyone. I am glad to see the spotify community comes together great in times of crisis which they seem to be happening more and more these past couple of months.

[Rollo_]

0.8.5 is working again

[rymclarney8388]

nevermind, Mutantdog had uploaded the link in a previous post. Somehow I missed it.

This may be a dumb question but should I completely uninstall Spotify then load the exe for 0.8.7 or should I just load the exe and have it act as an update?

Also, I am assuming I have to undo the trick to keep Spotify from updating correct? I had to create the 2 text tiles for 0.8.5 to keep from updating.

Any help with all of this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again everyone

[rymclarney8388]

are you serious??

This is music to my ears!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wait, now this means Spotify actually listened and did something right??? I can't believe it

[BigKev57]

@rymclarney8388: You don't have to do anything to the workaround. Just download and install the required files 🙂