Playing an Album

[davemoviejunkie]

Just started the 3-month introductory Premium service, and am having trouble with something I think should be simple, but doesn't appear to be ... playing an album.

Coming from Google Play Music, I'm used to the concept of finding an album, and just playing it. I must confess, I'm having trouble getting the same functionality from Spotify.

I'm currently using the Android app v7.1.0.1025 arm7. While there doesn't seem to be any way of searching for albums, here's my current workaround:

• Search for the artist
• Go to the artist page
• Scroll down and find the album, tap on it

... and here's where it becomes less that intuitive. There's a massive "Shuffle Play" button, which appears to do just what it says. But one of the "features" of Premium is that you can turn off Shuffle Play, isn't it? There doesn't appear to be any "Play" button, though.

Tapping on the three-dot menu gives me a number of options, the only one that seems to be what I want is "Add to Up Next". But all this does is to add all the tracks to the bottom of the "Up Next" queue, leaving everything that is already there above it. If I pull up the "Up Next" queue, I can then start playback from the start of the album I want, but this seems impractical.

Am I missing something? Is there a "Play this album now in track order" button somewhere?

[TayOfTheAygir]

If you tap on the first song, it will start playing the album from the first song, in track order, unless your shuffle is on. You can turn off shuffle on the "now playing" screen. If you tap on any other track, it will start from there and still play in track order.

Edit: Spotify searches for everything instead of a specific thing. if you scroll down, you'll see that it found not only artists, but playlists, albums, profiles and tracks too. Hope that helps. Have a nice day.

[davemoviejunkie]

OK, I've tried this process, but I must be doing something wrong.

I was listening to Blue & Lonesome, and then decided I'd listen to Building the Perfect Beast. So I went to Don Henley's artist page, tapped on Albums, found Perfect Beast and tapped on the first song. When I went to the play queue, here is what I saw:

... and, as displayed, the next song was Just Your Fool.  Scrolling down the Up Next list, I found this:

So the album was added as the end of the current album playing. YEs, I know I can skip through all the songs I don't now want, but ... really? There's no way of saying "I want to play this album now in its entirety?"

[TayOfTheAygir]

I tried the same method, on two albums I didn't have saved, for good measure. It worked for me. Now I'm pretty positive that you actually did exactly what I suggested (and if so, I don't know what else I can say), but just to be certain, are you sure you tapped the song? Because if you accidentally tapped the 3 dots next to the song(or pressed&held for a while) it gives you the context menu and you might have queued the song instead of playing it. I also checked the settings of both the Android  and PC apps' settings and couldn't find anything that might have caused this, but trying the accidental queueing thing gave me a similar result as yours.

Hope I could help.

[davemoviejunkie · Accepted solution]

After an upgrade to Spotify overnight, your method now works. 

I think what's happened is a misunderstanding of mine over the "Next Up" queue, as this appears to now have been cleared and albums now work as your method suggests. When I first started using Spotify, I though the "Next Up" was similar to the Play Queue in Google Music. I'm presuming music in the "Next Up" queue will always play next, and any songs you tap on to play while the queue exists simply get added to the front of that queue—ignoring the rest of the album.

I'll have a play with that over the next few days, as I'm trialling Spotify before getting a Family Plan for us all and want to be able to answer any questions the others may have! 🙂