Car Thing Feedback

[MattSuda]

This thread is for sharing your feedback for Car Thing 💚 🚙

What do you think about Car Thing? What do you like? What can be improved? Share your thoughts in this thread.

If you have a suggestion for a certain feature or change, you can read this thread on how to post it in the Community Ideas Exchange here:

Want to suggest how to make Car Thing even better? 

You can include a link to your idea when posting your feedback in this thread so other users can check it out and vote for it. You can absolutely toot your own car horn about your idea here.  🚙 🎺 📯

What is your favorite feature of Car thing? You can let us know here:

What do you like most about Car Thing?

[SpaceballSeven]

How do you think those of us that dropped $79 feel now that it's $29. 😕 

[Lifuu]

I want the Car Thing for desktop use. No USB compatibility is such a missed opportunity.

[bioticon]

I love my Car Thing, but the only frustration I keep running into is that the Albums tab is not sorted by recently added. It almost looks random as it’s not alphabetical either. Totally understand that I could use voice to find a specific album, but it would be a lot quicker with 2 taps when I already have it saved. 

thanks so much! 

[motsu]

So, my use case is a bit different. I use two car things as media controllers for around the house. Over all, i love the product, being able to use a dedicated screen to control my music keeps me a lot more focused when working. I use a lot of virtual desktops, and having to hunt down spotify to change playlists is the main activity that leads to me getting distracted... with the car thing on my desk, this happens NO MORE!

That being said, there is one big annoyance with using the car thing to control something other than your phone. I think spotify could make this problem disappear with a fairly simple software update.

Currently, the car thing controls my PC fine if i start playback on my pc, however if I pause my music for too long, resuming the playback by pressing the play icon on the car thing will start the music on my phone. I then have to open the desktop app, and change playback to the desktop app. Once I do that, everything works as intended again.

The simple fix would be for spotify to add a "default playback device" to the options menu! if this defaults to "your phone", the behavior would be the same as it is now, and would fill the car thing's initial use case... however if i could set a default playback device per car thing, that would be amazing... the one in my living room could be set to control my main listening area, so on.

I know its the CAR thing, but the thing is awesome as a desktop controller!

(ps, if you somehow found this thread when looking for desktop car thing use cases - heres a desk mount that you can 3d print since the car thing doesn't ship with one ❤️ )

[mw2000]

Yeah, it's pretty frustrating. Many of us have mentioned this but we haven't gotten a response. I forget about albums pretty easily but usually the first 20 of recently added are what I'm currently listening to, so it would be great to have those come up as the default in the Albums section on the device.

[dmnc_net]

One of the things, why I bought Spotify Car Thing, is the possibility to Dislike a song (I listen to Discover Weekly most of the time) and add a song to the playlist.

Instead, I can add a song to the end of the queue which is useless for me.

I can Like a song, at least. But in other cases, with this fancy Car Thing, I still have to operate with my cellphone during the ride and as I'm using it for Waze in landscape mode and Spotify is not rotating the view in the majority of screens, it sucks a lot.

We can't reply to this post: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Car-Thing/Want-to-suggest-how-to-make-Car-Thing-even-better/td-p/51... ... so starting this new one.

[Nicroy52]

This! I literally cannot use the playlist feature without this. I'm not scrolling through 600 songs of a playlist to get to a song I just put on there. This has to be an easy fix right? Need to be able to sort the playlists!

[imark123440542]

Car thing is awesome and I almost got into a car accident indirectly because of it.

So far loving my car thing, also some suggestions and why I almost got into a car accident indirectly because of it.

I recently purchased a car thing. So far I am enjoying it quite a lot and I'm actually considering getting a second. I think the price was a little high for what it is, which is why I snapped it up when it was on sale as I wasn't expecting to like it so much. I was thankful to catch the second sale as I missed the first one.

I originally purchased my device with an alternative ulterior usage.
paragraph redacted for privateering reasons. I thought it would be nice to have a device attached and then use the car thing as a media controller for Spotify. Apparently I am not the only person who thought about using this as a media controller outside of a vehicle as I ran across a video on YouTube of somebody using it on their desk. I think this is a really neat device that can have multiple uses, especially as a physical button remote control. It does not need to have batteries as a USB power bank is great. It even includes a handful of adapters one of which makes a perfect stand, the CD adapter.

There are a few things I would like to see.

Number zero: as somebody who doesn't like to permanently affix things to their vehicle. 3M adhesive tape well great is always worrying as I've seen many vehicles with permanent squares of the past stuck to them. It would be nice to have something that is either more easily removed without damage or more information on the help document and in the in box documents explaining removal and what to expect residue wise and what to do about it. That said for the first time in my life I did indeed stick it to my dashboard! And this will be a problem for future me I guess?

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Idea-Submissions/Other-car-thing-adhesive/idi-p/5528461#M167022

Number one: if for any reason you were to discontinue this device please for the love of e-waste open source it so it could be used for other things.

Number two: if that's not an option at least or also send an update that allows it to work in a standard Bluetooth controls profile as a dumb BT media control device. This could also be useful outside of Spotify and I would suspect be able to be switched in and out of if Spotify wasn't running without needing special permissions on the device.

Number three: the way the top preset buttons work is a little unintuitive and easily miss programmed. I would love to see it work in a way much like a car radio, where you either select the album or song or playlist and then press and hold for approximately 3 to 5 seconds to set and then have some sort of Visual confirmation. I have on 3 or 4 occasions had to reprogram them as they have gotten bumped somehow or reset. And then I had to re-figure out how to program back to what they were, which only happens if you go to the playlist you want and play a song within that. Which requires you to stop playing what is currently playing and play something else before it can be reset.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Idea-Submissions/Other-Car-thing-preset-buttons-need-some-refinemen...

Number four: if for any reason I decide to not connect my tablet or maybe leave it in the back of my van. Like say I want to listen to a CD, FM, AM or iPod that day It seems like after a day the car thing forgets its existence and goes into a reset demo mode state. Or worse freezes on a black screen requiring a power cycle.

Number five: an option to disable automatic play on power up would really be appreciated!

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Idea-Submissions/Other-hardware-car-thing-Disable-auto-play/idi-p/5...

Number six: this is the Doozy.
I drove an hour into the other state that's nearby me listening to music all the way and it was quite nice. On my way back there was a bunch of traffic on a section of the road where the high traffic multilane Road meets a highway and there's a bunch of stores. As this road goes under an overpass I was bopping along to the music calmly in traffic that was suddenly building up in that area. As one song ended another song came on and as I was thinking this is a really cool song and I want to turn it up a little because it's a quieter song with words that I was struggling to make out; traffic also started flowing, cars changing lanes trying to get in front of the others because you know it's always faster to go with the grass on the other side of the fence that's greener..... I'm trying not to crash and fighting with the car thing as I keep trying to adjust the volume on it and it's not going any higher it's like not adjusting the volume anymore at all. So I'm in traffic trying to fight with this thing which I shouldn't be and thankfully a very good driver and a very calm driver who's starting to get frustrated and more and more not paying attention to the road. I eventually said forget it stopped it entirely although not as soon as I should have until I could pull over five minutes later and figure out what happened. So this is why I say it indirectly caused me to have an accident. Something that CD players, cassette players, car radios and many other portable music devices including iPods which I still have and use have never F-ing did or had (I don't like swearing, I'm sure I did that day). I pull out my android tablet to find that it has decided to artificially effing limit the volume, my car radio is on 30 out of 36 and because it's a cheap inbuilt radio there is very little boost with the two cheap factory speakers. So what happened is the android device automatically without any warning lowered the volume to a point where it was almost inaudible through the car audio system and effectively disabled the volume control through the car thing. The only way I found out about this was when I dug the tablet out from between the seats to find the warning, a super small teeny tiny warning not visible when glancing at the device. I don't know if it matters I was connected over an aux cable to the headphone jack but I would suspect it will do the same thing over Bluetooth. I have purchased a USB-C to Aux cable and I live in fear of paranoia that it will still happen one day. And well most Apple devices have a way to limit the volume this is not on by default and is left up to the parents to decide whether it should be enabled whether they know about it or not.
As I have always had super good hearing and have always protected my hearing to the point of pure pain and mass hysteria when I was 4-6 years old whenever other younger or older ill developed younghans would cry for whatever reason causing ear piercing pain to me. I can say at the age of 34 I can hear up to 16kHz+ much to the astonishment of my audiologist. As during the hearing test I was hearing the fountain outside the house in a sound controled room and had to be retested uncertain tones because she thought there was no way I actually heard them. after mixing bands I will listen at lower volumes for the following 24 hours, if I do listen to anything. and I carry ear plugs on my keychain after a few too many incidents with fire alarm tests....
I take my hearing seriously and I have always protected it. I have two hands on the steering wheel and whenever a song changes I will be adjusting the volume multiple times throughout the song in some cases. I'm not somebody who Kranks everything to 11 except for maybe briefly for one song.

And well I know you have no control over android, I also have absolutely no way of influencing them whereas a major app will have a fair bit of clout. I think there should be a setting that is on by default but exists in the settings to be disabled if needed. As there is no way to change this I suspect without rooting the device which is impossible in some cases. This may or may not be something that the Spotify app has control over as well. I was using a LG tablet, and well I had a Samsung tablet that did something similar it was nowhere near as intrusive but still very intrusive.

Just like that annoying "your device is charged" pop up which you can't disable that indirectly mentally subconsciously implies that you should unplug your device. which I have seen users do, which causes extra cycles than necessary on the battery ruining it quicker rather than put in a proper battery charge circuit.

[NotJohnBoy]

Please add the “skip forward 15 seconds” feature during ads for podcasts. As it currently is, the button is there during the podcast but disappears during ads forcing me to look at my phone to skip them.