There are things going on with Spotify that I can find posts about from years ago that have never been fixed... I wondered if that's on purpose in some cases?
On the Mac client it's very difficult to find local files. It's possible, but unnecessarily difficult. For instance, I have the full version of Madonna's Confessions Tour in my iTunes. (The Spotify version is edited and misses some songs.) When I look up "madonna confessions tour" I only get first fifteen local results. So I have to look up single songs to add them to my playlist. But that's unnecessarily difficult as well. If I look up "forbidden love tour" there are no results. (Song is called, obviously, "Forbidden Love" and the album "Confessions Tour".) I have to look up "forbidden love" and hope it shows in first 15 results. If it doesn't, because it's, say, result #16, I have to rename songs in my iTunes. Also there's no way to look up a local ALBUM. You have to go track-by-track. It's not possible to click album title in the 15 tracks that local search displays. I wonder if this is to enforce using primarily Spotify versions of songs? Search on my Android client brings up all (not 15) tracks I downloaded, but doesn't show the playlist – I search for "confessions tour", the playlist is called "Confessions Tour". So I can play a single song from the search, but not all of them.
It is not possible to add an album from local files on Android. I have to create a playlist for it. That I can't find in search results. So I have to manually go to my (huge) list of playlists and find it to play it. While Crapple Music is, in general, a bug nest, they got that one right. To avoid having lots of albums with one song that is on some random playlists it would be enough to create an "Add as album/Add as song" option on the client.
The Android widget is constantly crashing and unloading. Someone has asked "would you like a constantly running notification" – well actually I would. My "research" leads me to believing that widget and Spotify app are separate applications, as when the widget crashes I can still listen to music and open the Spotify client by clicking on the crashed widget. Which sometimes doesn't reload even though I started the app. And sometimes it does. Possibly it needs to be rewritten from scratch. It's very odd that all other widgets I have continue working without problems. I went from Xperia Z5 Compact (2GB RAM) to Samsung Galaxy S7 (4GB RAM), no dice. Please don't tell me to reinstall, I did it so many times I lost count.
A "Download all files" option on Android would be awesome. I have a lot of albums and playlists on my SD card, and when I reinstall Spotify I have to download every single one by hand. Click, click, click, click, click, click... You can't even download a folder with playlists, you have to go into the folder and download each of them by hand.
It takes a looong time to start the app when you have stored content. Going into offline mode reduces the time from 1 minute to 5 seconds, but still, it's impossible for me to just plug in headphones for autoplay, because my phone doesn't have a "start Spotify, wait 10 seconds, press play" capability. So I put the headphones in, wait a while, then press play which isn't so much of a problem unless I am in a hurry. And in online mode that while is very long. I suppose it's syncing my phone's storage and checking for changes in playlists but I'd find it helpful if it started playing music FIRST and then checked for changes.
It's still impossible to play imported local files gapless. I see that the Spotify downloads start buffering a few seconds before the song ends, but songs downloaded from iTunes/My Music don't. I don't understand why this is a problem. They are all stored on my phone.
All those issues have been ongoing for a looooong time. I wondered if – same as the 3333 songs limit – they are actually contractually stipulated? (Of course you cannot answer that.) I don't think it would be extremely difficult from technical point of view, say, to increase search results for local files to 50 or to allow searching for playlists on Android...
Staff / Moderator/ 2 years ago in Social & Random