Help with the new "Me" interface

[TayOfTheAygir]

Can I approximate my old habits of saving/downloading/listening on the new interface or am I just screwed? Here's how thing used to work for me:

- I used to have the download switch on for the songs I saved, so when I saved a specific song, it would automatically download.
- I mainly used the Library>Artist list to access the songs I saved, which was nice, I could binge-listen the whole discography of an artist without having to take my phone out of my pocket and play the next album.
- I could unsave songs I didn't like, so I wouldn't have to download them or come across them when I listen to music. 

To summarize and provide an example, I used to be able to save a couple of non-album singles, the entirity of "Multi-Love" and "Unknown Mortal Orchestra", plus the album "II" but without the 3 songs from that album that I don't like. As a result, I could listen singles, complete albums and parts of albums from an artist in a string, without, for example needing a free hand and enough room to pull out the phone on that stuffy bus where I stand, or having to take my glove off and touch my phone on a cold winter day outside. It was awesome user experience. Now it is not awesome at all.

😞

Update 1: I fiddled around a bit and found out that I can still switch song download on, but the absolutely silly thing is, when you save an entire album you have saved none of the songs, and when you have saved all the songs on an album, you haven't saved the album. So you can only view the saved songs as individual items, and I used to have more than a thousand songs in my library, which will make it very hard for me to find my songs and play them in order. I will probably need to make a playlist for every single artist I want to listen to, and litter my list of playlists that is already kind of a mess.

I also found out that saving (or "favoriting", another stupid thing I will talk about) an album means you now have a shortcut to that album, congrats! You can now go to the full album, not the songs you "favorited" from that album. There are two problems with that. The first one is, the song from that album that I don't like will be queued. I have to manually skip/remove it every time I listen to an album now. The second one is, if I forget or neglect to remove it from the queue when I'm on mobile data, the song that I didn't even want to listen in the first place will cost me my precious bytes, which especially sucks if you live in Turkey.

Also, whoever thought that releasing this update without/before making a similar update available for the desktop app would be fine was STUPID. I had to figure out whether the old function of saving a song was still there and whether saving on computer would result in favoriting on the phone. It was frustrating and confusing, thank God it didn't take long.

The only way I can work around this is going to songs, filtering them by artist's name, but the only sorting option I would then get is by title or by recency, not by album. If Spotify added a "sort by album/artist" option it'd all be fine but of course, they won't do this in the near future. I used their Windows Phone app before and also watched them as they updated and downgraded the desktop app. They don't really care what they take away form the users with these updates. I understand that this interface change will just make a lot of people happy and a lot of people will be just indifferent, but I bet there are a lot of people that used to enjoy Spotify like I did and now they have no way of doing that.

As soon as I find a more suitable streaming platform, I will switch.

Update 2: Please support my suggestion here, thanks in advance:
http://bit.ly/2gQn8OF

Update 3: The best workaround I've found so far is switching to offline mode so the app grays out the other songs and skips ahead to the downloaded ones. This means you have to choose whether you want to download the new songs you favorited or enjoy that part of the album you like when you're on wi-fi, or whether you are going to find and share the url of that song you found online and didn't fave but you thought your friend would like when you're listening while the moile data is on. You still have to queue all the albums and singles together to listen to an artist's selected discography, in contrast to having to press play on one of the songs(which is what the previous interface provided).

[TayOfTheAygir]

Added the text that used to be here to the original post.

[chrisparton1991]

It took me quite a while to figure out how to access my library on my phone (Galaxy S6).

I looked in "Me > Favourites" and saw a couple of songs on my screen, but didn't think to scroll down as I assumed my library content would be front and centre. I was also expecting the term "Library" to still be used.

I think a lot of people are going to have the same issue I did. Having said that, now that I know where my library is, it's not a huge deal for me. It even makes sense, it was just an awkward transition due to the simultaneous renaming ("Library" -> "Favourites) and demoting the page from a global tab to a button in the "Me" tab.

Update:

Having used the feature for a bit longer now, I'm hitting all of the issues the OP has detailed. The new interface makes it a lot harder to play just the songs you like from an album. Instead of hitting shuffle on my saved album songs, I'm finding myself having to manually queue up enough songs to last me however long I think I'll be listening.

I'm spending less time listening to music and more time battling the software.

[TayOfTheAygir]

Fellow sufferer,

Check out my third update. Though it isn't a solution, it might help.

Thank you for your interest.

[user-removed]

I haven't been invited to try this "Me Beta" out, but it sounds like they're trying to bypass this whole "max 10 000 saved songs". A lot of us album listeners have been complaining about it.
I like to save complete albums but when I hit the 10 000 limit I won't be able to save more albums.
So from my understanding, this would bypass this?
Also a question: is it harder or easier Library Management for a listener who mainly saves albums?

[TayOfTheAygir]

It's definitely harder to manage a library and I see no reason why it should bypass the saved song limit. It makes it kind of easier to organize music thru playlists tho, because you can favorite all the songs in the playlist, and when you have download enabled for favorited songs, you don't have to enable download for each individual playlist.

Maybe this is Spotify's move in killing album as a format and glorifiying playlists. It makes sense coz when I pick and save songs from an album, only I see it and there's no social media value. This little trick they did, along with the "edit details" feature on playlists, will turn Spotify into more of a playlist-based social media platform. People will in turn be more interested in the app because of the social media factor and spend more time on it. Free users spending more time exposed to visual ads, premium users in more dire need of their subscriptions, less likely to downgrade... I can see no other reason for them to RUIN the old interface.

[Joe]

Saving an album but not all the tracks within it does mean that the 10,000 saved song limit will not be hit as quickly. I would guess that users who have set all saved or favourited songs to download autmatically represents a minority so I'm not sure how much notice Spotify will take of their needs. Presumably, you still have the option of adding an album to a new playlist?