I tried Spotify for the first time 2 years ago, and I was instantly hooked. Within two hours I had a spotify premium account and within a few weeks I even invested in a new stereo and a good DAC. I basically use it for hours every day and for the most part, I love it. But there have been a few quirks along the way and some bad design.
Starting off with the quirks:
* Over the past two years, my entire playlists have been deleted between 10 and 15 times. In other words every couple of months, something happens and I gotta redownload them. I pay for premium, I pay for offline, and I primarily do so because my internet is **uh-oh**. Which brings me to the next point.
* No speed control - I can't in any way tell spotify "Use no more then 80 KBPS down and 20 KBPS up speed". In other words, every time my playlists get deleted or something happens, I'm stuck for days downloading and it completely strains my internet. Third party software (NetLimiter) has solved this for me now but it's still unacceptable.
* Not beeing able to import playlists from one computer to another. I may have all songs downloaded on my laptop, or on my stationary computer, but even attempting to extract them from one computer to the other is hopeless, same with importing songs from my computer to my cellphone. I bought a new computer today, I can't import songs from this computer to the new one, not possible. So I'm stuck downloading for days again.
* Too easy to accidentially delete entire playlists. In order to select offline mode you simply put click the slider button on the top of the screen - one click and it's offline, that's good. But if you accidentially click it, one single time, the entire playlist you've spendt days downloading gets instantly deleted. There is no pop-up menu asking me "Do I really want to delete 25 gigabytes of offline music?" I DON'T! (And no, this is not the reason my playlists have gotten deleted at a regular basis)
* Playlists get instantly deleted when there's trouble with the bank information or similar. A month back there was some trouble with my payment - and my entire playlist got deleted, it took me a week to redownload it as I'm reliant on a (super)stable internet connection. I think this is rude to someone who has been a stable subscriber for two years running, is it really that hard to give a 2 day grace period where I can resubscribe?
You did reimbuse the lost week though, I appriciate that.
And yes, I get that you don't want people sharing the music outside of spotify, but this creates a negative user experience.
Now over to the next points, primarily relating to the user interface:
* Can't disable the "Buy this song" button, I accidentially missclick at times and it's pretty frustrating.
* Can't disable Spotify Social anymore - In the beginning we could simply hide the sidebar, and that was okey. But now with a fresh spotify install, I'm stuck having a relatively large portion of my screen hijacked but a function I don't use. This is not acceptable, it should be easy to hide it. As a premium user it should be my choice whether I want to see this or not.
* Can't customize user interface - I can't change the colors, I can't change text size, I can't remove functions I don't use such as app, I can't place playlists on the top of the sidebar and on a small screen I end up always having to scroll down to them. Nor can I rearrange things, or remove bars I don't use such as who added the song to the playlist.
* No X-Out button on Search bar, it used to be there, now it's removed. Was that really necessary?
* Playlists are not numbered: Basically there's no "Song number 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-10-200-1998" bar. This makes it unnecessarily hard to rearrange playlists in the order that you want them.
* No skins in app store, really?
* Can't rearrange random playlists - basically if I start playing randomly and I decide "That song would go better in front of this one" spotify stops me from doing this.
* Can't delete songs from random playlist. Why not? If I don't wanna hear the next song what's wrong in letting me push delete and remove it from queue?
* Can't Pause playlist download without deleteing the playlist or turning spotify off. If I want my bandwidth for something else and still wanna use spotify, you don't give me that choice.
* When downloading playlists - the currently playing song is not always prioritized over "the next in line" song.
Anyhow, it's an overall great product. But please stop beeing so darn lazy on the user friendlyness side of things.
Staff / Moderator/ 2 years ago in Social & Random