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!

[user-removed]

I can not go into my Spotify profile from the scroll window at the top right anymore, I have to go into a playlist and press my name .... just saying

[smallseb]

For starters, I should say that this is going in the right way.

pgm are trying to improve what they did and partially understood why 0.8.8 was a failure. 
still, there are some new improvements that are noticeable : 
- the web player is great, and this function is greatly appreciated. fast way to use spotify (better than to start it, see below)
- great new apps ;

Though, it's not enough:
- the cross-fader is not working anymore, 
- spotify takes literally HOURS to open (on a dual core i5) ;
- the way to find facebook's friends is still hard (the old fashion way where all your fb friends using spotify was way better). Unless you type their name in the research field, they will not come up ;
- sometimes, songs freeze

Honestly, I have some old setup of spotify somewhere, if it continues to bore me the way it is actually boring me, I might just as well get back to the old good light fashionable way of spotify.

EDIT: the more I read on this topic, the more I see people complaining about one thing that was actually in the few posts that I've made : we're here for the MUSIC, not so much for the social interaction... Please remember that. 

[HelloGoodbye]

I have a bad feeling the development team was replaced somewhere around 0.8.5.

Or is it just new management urgent directives, poorly executed?

Is there an insider here who can tell?

[olejon]

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@HelloGoodbye wrote:

I have a bad feeling the development team was replaced somewhere around 0.8.5.

Or is it just new management urgent directives, poorly executed?

Is there an insider here who can tell?

---

I suspect that when they decided to build the web player (somewhere around or before 0.8.5), a lot of developers were moved to that project. To make development of the desktop client and the web player more simple/cheap, they decided to share code between the two by using webviews in the desktop client to show content, the same as in the web player. I can not say it has been a success. Most of the complaints can be traced back to the webviews, like slowness, resource-hungriness, white UI that doesn't match the rest of the application, etc.

Since 0.8.5, except for the follow feature (which one can't say has been a huge success), Spotify really hasn't introduced any new feature in its desktop client. Rather, they have removed features, like view as album list. In other words, they had a client and a code that worked perfectly fine, then they decided to scrap it to introduce webviews to simplify/streamline development, but since they have released all these versions since 0.8 without really introducing any new features or improving the app in terms of stability, resource usage, etc, it is probable that they have only created more work for themselves, instead of less, which was probably the goal. In the long run, it may change, but god knows that their plan is regarding they desktop client, when they are auto-upgrading some users without asking (being used as guinea pigs), to a desktop preview version which is basically the web player in a window.

I develop web-apps, and HTML5 is great, but mixing in webviews with native elements all over the place rarely works out well. It requires a lot of code to make the native elements and the webviews communicate and interact. Code that wasn't necessary before. That's what the Facebook Android and iOS app was before, a ugly mix of webviews in between some native elements. The media reported that "Facebook ditched HTML5", when in fact they had never used HTML5 anywhere close to its potential. They just served static content in webviews, could just as well have been in HTML4. Supporting Android 2.2 and 2.1, they had no way at all to utilize the things you have to utilize to make a web app perform and feel like native app, things like touch events, hardware accelerated CSS animations and fixed position elements. Better to choose one technology and code everything in that. Having an all-native desktop client and the web player as a nice addition for those who can't use the desktop client would be the best, in my opinion. I think the fast, clean and simple desktop client Spotify has been known for is a big part of its success. Now, there's a lot of competition, and Spotify seems to want to be just yet another web player, treating their users as a part of the product, which is sold to the big record labels, so that they can "promote" (push) their music on you.

[LeavingSPOTIFY]

I assumed spotify had given up when I quit my unlimited subscription. >Click the reason you are leaving  >Technical issues/Spotify not working properly > No follow up to find out what the issue is.

I'd love to come back as a lifetime subscriber if you come up with a working product, apps and all.

I have a feeling google music streaming service may come up with a working product first though judging by spotify's ability to lose a loyal customer like me who prefer's to lock in a subscription and auto payment.      

Oh, and I'm not your FREE beta tester SPOTIFY !! 

[brudy]

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@miskidomleka wrote:

@brudy

 It's been the whole series of releases which have gotten progressively worse,

I disagree, I think that 0.9.0.133 is slightly better than whatever was the previous version. It's virtually identical, but the cache location bug was fixed, so it looks like the first step in the right direction.

---

Except they still suck compared to 8.5. It might be better compared to earlier .9 releases, but is still completely awful comparatively. Install 8.5 and try for yourself.

[miskidomleka]

@brudy

Except they still suck compared to 8.5. It might be better compared to earlier .9 releases, but is still completely awful comparatively. Install 8.5 and try for yourself.

First, my point was that at this point it's not progressively worse anymore, if 133 is better (or at least not worse) than 128/129.

Second, I did use 8.5 before, and I see how 0.9.0 is in some ways worse than 0.8.5. On the other hand, 0.8.5 is lacking a feature that is very important for me, a feature that was introduced in 0.8.8 or 0.9.0.

Everyone has different needs, and I was actually surprised that someone in this thread recommended reverting to some ancient version which did not even support gapless playback. Gapless playback is absolutely vital for me, and one of two main problems I have with Spotify is that gapless is supported in the player, but still many albums are not gapless due to improper encoding.

If this and classical music search was fixed, I would not care about white background, slightly longer load times, these are only minor annoyances for me.

[Smurführer]

"...If this and classical music search was fixed"

back in february Ulyssestone (Who does the Ulysses Classical app in Spotify) wrote on twitter that he was fixing meta-data for 19.000 classical albums, so they would be more searchable. He hasn't twittered since then, and he stopped updating the playlists in the app. I hope he's just busy, and that his silence isn't a bad omen.

[Rollo_]

smallseb wrote:

EDIT: the more I read on this topic, the more I see people complaining about one thing that was actually in the few posts that I've made : we're here for the MUSIC, not so much for the social interaction... Please remember that.

Quoted for truth.  I couldn't possibly care less about the social aspect.  It should be programmed as an add-on app, not the default. 

There would be a lot fewer problems with the software if they wouldn't keep adding things that a lot of us don't want, and don't work very well for much of anything except slowing down an already slow program.  The old versions are LIGHTNING fast.

[camembert]

@Smurführer wrote:

back in february Ulyssestone (Who does the Ulysses Classical app in Spotify) wrote on twitter that he was fixing meta-data for 19.000 classical albums, so they would be more searchable. He hasn't twittered since then, and he stopped updating the playlists in the app. I hope he's just busy, and that his silence isn't a bad omen.

---

This should probably be in a different thread (though I've no idea where, and I have looked), but recently, tags on many classical releases have actually got worse: the big Dorati box of Haydn symphonies, for example, and many of the DG boxes like this Furtwangler set, have had all data about the piece and/or composer stripped, leaving just tempo indications or very general titles like "Prelude". The result is awful - you can't search for anything, and you can't even tell what anything is from the track listing. Perhaps these changes came from the labels involved, I don't know, but it doesn't fill me with confidence about where we're heading.

[Chris_G]

Apologies if this is in the wrong place, or it's already been covered (I've skimmed the previous 10 or so pages!), but for the past few updates, Playlists no longer keep the ordering I've set, and default back to ordered by data added, oldest first.

Is this a bug or intentional? I'd rather like to display the newest first again!

v0.9.0.133, Win7 x64.

[Rollo_]

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@Chris_G wrote:

Playlists no longer keep the ordering I've set, and default back to ordered by data added, oldest first.

---

The sort order chosen by clicking on a column has never stuck to my recollection.  I select and drag everything to get the order I want and only use the column sorts to find something quickly, primarily albums.  When looking for specific tracks I use the search filter, but sort if looking for duplicates.

[Peter__]

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@Rollo_ wrote:

---

@Chris_G wrote:

Playlists no longer keep the ordering I've set, and default back to ordered by data added, oldest first.

---

The sort order chosen by clicking on a column has never stuck to my recollection.  I select and drag everything to get the order I want and only use the column sorts to find something quickly, primarily albums.  When looking for specific tracks I use the search filter, but sort if looking for duplicates.

---

The sort order not saving is a bug in v0.8.8 onwards main topic is here. 

Peter

[DennyEMufc]

Darn tootin about adding bloat we just dont need, 085 IS fast compared to ANY 09 version, there is a very very simple solution to all this ...

allow peole to install WHICH version they want !

and STOP STOP STOP doing forced updates, we dont want or need em !!!!!!!!!!!

[Sam]

---

@Smurführer wrote:

"...If this and classical music search was fixed"

back in february Ulyssestone (Who does the Ulysses Classical app in Spotify) wrote on twitter that he was fixing meta-data for 19.000 classical albums, so they would be more searchable. He hasn't twittered since then, and he stopped updating the playlists in the app. I hope he's just busy, and that his silence isn't a bad omen.

---

Smurführer - I thought I'd email a couple of people regarding this. Turns out, we're currently working hard with the labels to get this sorted. I can't promise a timeframe though, unfortunately.

[Smurführer]

Hey, that sounds good! And the latest Spotify release sort of works on my computer (even though it's a bit slow), so I'm not doing any more complaining in this thread at the moment. There's still hope!

[miskidomleka]

Turns out, we're currently working hard with the labels to get this sorted.

That would be great. Screwed up metadata is one of the biggest obstacles in using Spotify for classical music comfortably. There is a large relevant thread in the Ideas section http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/Why-Classical-Fans-NEED-Composer-Metadata-and-what-tha...

Are you also working with the labels on fixing non-gapless albums? I have been reporting these for months, then I just stopped as it seemed completely in vain.

[Sam]

miskidomleka - Could PM me a couple of the albums that aren't appearing as gapless? I'll then forward them through.

[Kael]

Right so, I have a whole bunch of Rammstein tracks added through local files. Now I know that Spotify in the UK basically doesn't have Rammstein accessible, however in this latest version, I don't seem to be able to click on the artist's page and have it link back to my local files, which was the case before. 

I can't click on the artist page and play tracks that I already own.

[user-removed]

Unsubscribed premium couple of weeks ago...and not going back anymore. Just a waste of money...