Help - Desktop (Linux, Mac and Windows)

[jayy]

I and others I'm assuming have been waiting patiently for an update. However I'm not worried about new features, etc. I just want the bugs FIXED that have been in demand now since November - December of 2011.

When could we expect an actual update that would address bugs / issues?

I think you guys seem to release a new update but also new features or a overhaul change and all it does is break something vs fixes anything.

Fix what needs to be fixed, then work on improving the the functionality of the service, such as new features, etc.

Thanks.

[George]

It would be nice to see a big update that instead of added new features we don't really care that much about (though some of them may be cool), was just a load of bug fixes.

It's not like we don't report enough of them! I know bug fixing is one of those ongoing things, but it would be nice to see a month of so of developer time put aside to just storm through the bugs, isolate them, assign the fixing of them to developers and try and get the client tidied up a bit.

I genuinely believe that this is one of the things that customers (like myself) would love to see. The thing that I love about Spotify is that it just works. In the last year or so, it's become a lot less reliable and a lot less "it just works" - I know new features are going to have teething problems but at the end of the day, I pay for Spotify to listen to music, I don't pay for it to tell everyone who I'm friends with one Facebook what I've been listening to.

It's the little bugs like tracks not always playing, that are repeatedly breaking, being fixed hastily, then breaking again. Or the what's new page that went for ages with plenty of us complaining that it never stopped trying to load! 

I'm with jayy on this one, can we get the client tidied up a bit? Please? I hate iTunes because of its bloatiness, Spotify is edging closer and closer to being bloaty, keep it simple and keep it working perfectly!

[George]

And as expected, we've got no more responses on this thread... I wonder why... :smileytongue:

[jayy]

I guess it's because it isn't a question the revolves around the most important issues like: Billing, Facebook, Duplicated Accounts, etc. Hopefully one of the employees will at least reply.

[David]

Hello,

We certainly are reading. While we don't tend to have release notes, I assure you that bug fixes are certainly a part of those updates. Is there a particular bug or cause for concern that affecting you?

[jayy]

David,

Thanks for the reply :) - For me it's all the drama / activity floating around the software. One major issue is the most popular one right now is the loading issue for the friends, etc. very frustrating.

However these are my concerns:

1.) Clean up the UI a bit. Make it less drama. All this facebook, etc is just bloating the software with stuff that is not needed.

2.) Fix the RADIO already. I did hear something about you guys were thinking a Pandora a like radio system, that is great but the radio was better before the radio revamp. (Multi Genres, Better Music Expereincing, etc) You can be listening to the radio, then all of a sudden it gets lost in zone and when you try to skip or forward it keeps replaying the same song until you change the radio, then back, quite frustrating, then your back to listening to the same music all over again.

3.) When you add song to the Queue, the previous or next tracks buttons do not work, etc.

- There is more but I'm sure you get the picture now these issues been on going since the new release back in end of November - December of last year.

It's just frustrating to see: Crossfase, etc but yet these are new features but the more importantly the software is bloaty, broken, and other things needs top priority.

I hope this helps and hopefully george can get into more detail, but I agree Spotify was great at one point it is turning into the next iTunes with all this mumble jumble when Spotify just needs to be just Simple.

[George]

In agreement with Jayy's points, but my primary concern is that the client is losing the simplistic feel that it had when I first started using Spotify. It was simple, you searched for music, you added it to a playlist, listened to it.

I've got nothing against Facebook integration, but it's starting to become more important than the primary aim of the software - discover and play music. Certain things seem to get in the way, like some of the features of the play queue. To my knowledge its always worked in the same way, but always frustrated me in the same way: I start listening to music from an artists page, it queues up all the music by that artist in the play queue... that's fine. But then when I go into the play queue I might decide I don't want to listen to half a dozen of the songs that've been added, so it seems intuitive to highlight those tracks then right click and hit "Delete"... only that the "Delete" option is greyed out! I understand how the queue works entirely, but this seems to confuse a lot of users, and seems counterintuitive - would enabling this option have a detrimental affect on how the queue works? I don't think so, especially when you've got some of the best developers around working for you.

The bug with tracks that don't play, where you have to move the slider from 0:00 forwards to get it to play, or try playing the track again - it needs investigating and solving.

The people list doesn't make sense. I get an identical list for "Everyone" and "On Spotify", which as far as I can tell is only the friends I have who have a Spotify account.

The What's New page is getting cluttered with social things I don't really want to see, let your users decide how much they care about social media by adding options to hide and turn off things like "Trending playlists" and "Top playlists near you".

The Radio app as jayy mentioned, it's lost the genre selection feature. Some of us used it, it seems a shame to lose it.

The implementation of Local Files is fine, until it goes wrong, with duplicate entries etc. Perhaps something to help people organise that would be useful?

Playlist folders are great, but organising say 50 playlists into a useful structure is a pain... especially if the drag and drop is misbehaving. Why not add the ability to alphabetise playlist order?

Playlist sorting / ordering, is the 3 click system really that intuitive? I've responded to at least a handful of people who've complained they can't reorder their playlist about this, and it's been because they've unknowingly ordered their playlist using the field names at the top. Perhaps add a tool tip for when people try to move a track when the track is sorted like this?

"Top Artists" on profiles, lovely feature, but not everyone wants it to be displayed. Excellent there's an option in preferences to turn it off. But even though its not set to publish it, it still appears when viewing your own profile - counter intuitive or a bug?

The automatic opening of the client, no ends of people have been reporting problems with that setting. And it defaults to running when you install it now? Seriously, you guys are better than this, it's just not needed, this is where iTunes goes wrong, it invites itself to run a million helper processes and slows everything down.

The final irritance is the insistence that all new users sign up through Facebook. Why? Does it not surprise you that some people don't have a Facebook account? And then this has caused a lot of the duplicate account problems as well.

Rant over, you still have an awesome product but it would be nice to see a few of the problems that people seem to run into day after day smoothed over to improve people's experiences.

Edit-

On a side note, I know you update the client reasonably regularly with bug fixes etc, maybe you should publicize them more so that we are aware of what bugs have been fixed in each update. It might reduce the number of people who think you aren't listening to customers. #justsaying

[jayy]

Thank you george :)

You have summed that up perfectly. I was a little busy at the time I read and replied. However it was well said. However even with it's minor issues Spotify is still well worth it.

[David]

Hey!

Thanks for the feedback. Some public release notes on updates might be something we could improve on.

As somewhat a response to that, we've posted an announcement to the update we're rolling out to users at the moment - http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Announcements/New-version-of-Spotify-for-desktop/m-p/55931

Hopefully this should resolve some teething issues. The majority of what is suggested here is more client features rather than bugs, however, and ones that are featured on the ideas board. Maybe need to be a little more proactive about highlighting some threads there? We try and do it where we can - But any ideas on how to better highlight highly kudo'd ideas would be interesting to hear.

[George]

Thanks for the update David.

One of the problems with the Idea Board is the fact that as soon as you land on it you get a page of ideas with few kudos and little relevance to the vast majority of users. There's 50 odd pages of ideas. No wants to traul through all of them. But the more popular ideas aren't at the forefront of the board, you have to click on "Top Ideas". But then when you do, the first thing is the iPad app idea... which has now been implemented, so it doesn't need to appear there. In fact there's a few ideas that are implemented appearing in that section.

Why aren't the more popular ideas being pushed to the first page where everyone lands immediately? That way people will see them, hit and kudo them up (if they like them). There's also a ton of duplicate ideas, or very similar ones. Maybe when creating a new idea, the user should be forced to see a list of ideas that contain similar words / tags to help stop people from just getting frustrated and adding new ideas that aren't "new".

Maybe a summary overview of the most highly kudo'd ideas would be nice. Everyone can see what people are really asking for, and it might prompt those people who hadn't really thought about it into supporting an idea that would really benefit them.

Looking at the announcement made about the newest version, you've mentioned "Various bug fixes", would it hurt to provide a short list just very briefly detailing which bugs have been fixed? "Various" is a bit amiguous, it could mean 2 minor bugs or it could be several major bugs that've been causing all sorts of problems behind the scenes. Just a little bit more info on what's fixed, and what's not would be good.

Another idea might be to create a separate "Bug Board", where people can raise issues (publically), and you can then respond with a similar status like you do in the Ideas Board. Then we can all see whether you've acknowledged something's a bug, or whether it's not actually a bug and just users misinterpretting something (and then the thread could be moved accordingly). Perhaps a slightly higher level of moderation of that board would be required. But it would really help provide feedback to users about whether a bug is being fixed, or still hasn't been reported, isn't really a bug, has been fixed, etc.

What do you think?

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PS: I quite like the name "Bug Board" :smileytongue: