The New Desktop App

[dan]

UPDATE - May 5th, 2023

Hey folks,

We appreciate the feedback you've provided us with regarding the new desktop UI; it's being taken into account!

We're chiming in to redirect you to the current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 

Thanks!

UPDATE - April 16th, 2021

Hey folks,

We've tried to cover most of the frequently asked questions concerning the new update in this Spotify Answer - Make sure to check it out!

We'll continue to go through all your posts in this blog, so if you have any other questions besides the ones in the FAQ, feel free to add them in a comment below.

Thanks,

The Community Moderator Team

UPDATE - April 8th, 2021

Hi Everyone,

Yesterday we published a blog post on our engineering blog which goes into more details on the new UI, the reasons behind it and the process of building it.  If you'd like to read a few more details like that you can check it out here.

I'd also like to mention a few things coming in upcoming versions of Desktop

• We're working on bringing back a list-like Discography view, something many of you have mentioned missing in the new UI.  We expect this to land in an upcoming release, so do watch this space and make sure you remain fully updated.
• "Discovered On" playlists for artists will be back in an upcoming release.
• We're working on bringing to Desktop the ability (like in our mobile apps) to see all the saved songs by a particular artist from within the artist page itself.  Again this will be arriving in an upcoming Desktop release.

Thanks,
Dan

ORIGINAL POST -----

Hi everyone

Dan here from the Desktop team again. I wanted to make another post to once again thank you all for your continued feedback, and also give a little more detail about what we’re doing from here on in.

In short, the new user interface is the future of the Spotify Desktop client, and over the coming weeks we’ll roll out the new UI to all Desktop users. Many of you will have noticed already, but we’ve based the new experience on the more modern and scalable Web Player codebase, and in doing so made both versions more aligned and easier to use than ever before.

Why are we making this change?

We believe in the future of the Desktop platform and want to make sure it can still serve the needs of our users now and into the future. 

The existing Desktop UI codebase became increasingly hard to maintain as time went on, and you may have noticed a growing gap between the Desktop and Mobile apps in some cases. For those of you interested in the technical details, a blog post on the engineering blog is coming soon. The short story, however, is that our desire to continue pushing Desktop forward and bringing new features to it became incompatible with the reality of maintaining the legacy experience.

Meanwhile, we had a Web Player serving similar user needs, but built in a much more modern and scalable way — with a more cohesive Spotify “look & feel”. We therefore resolved to use the Web Player UI code as the basis for both Web and Desktop in the future, and have been spending quite some bringing the Desktop-class features that you’ve come to expect to this shared platform. You’ve had a sneak peek of this as we’ve been testing and building things out, so once again I’d like to thank you for both being a part of it and giving great feedback on this thread that has definitely helped us improve.

Benefits of this approach

Firstly, I’d like to say that this really is a new beginning for the Desktop app. Long-term Desktop users will start to notice more rapid iteration on the app than they’ve seen in the past.

I’d like to call out some of the things in the new Desktop, and also give you a little taste of what’s to come.

Design - We’ve focused on consistency, are using more color to enhance the experience where appropriate, and are making better use of cover art and album images in the app. We're also better aligned to other platforms, put an increased focus on accessibility, interactions and animations, and have tightened up our design language, so it’s more in line with what users have come to expect from Spotify.

Functionality - We’ve brought the functionality that users expect from Desktop, like sorting/filtering, drag & drop, and advanced settings and options, whilst improving areas like playlist creation and curation, profile pages, and more. In many cases these improvements have landed in the Web Player, so the work here has benefited our combined users on both platforms.

Tip! You’ll also find new keyboard shortcuts for many tasks (press ctrl+? to see them) which makes certain actions much faster and easier for any user.

We are also aware that there are a few aspects raised in the community that haven't been fully addressed as part of this update, but items like the Search Bar and discography on artist pages have ultimately been brought closer in line with other Spotify applications. That said, we will continue to iterate on the experience across both platforms moving forward.

The future of Desktop

As mentioned above, this change to the Desktop UI gives us the ability to move faster in bringing you new improvements, features and functionality — so you can expect to see continued improvements to the client in the weeks and months to come.

Once again, I’d like to thank you all for helping us shape the Desktop App over the past year on behalf of everyone here at Spotify, and please do continue to post your feedback and use our Ideas section here in the Community to tell us what you’d like to see and why.

Thanks again,

Dan

[sashkabo]

Hi!

It's really cool that you changed desktop version, but why did you moved artists under song titles? As for me it was a very important column in a list of songs. Sometimes I sort a list by an artist, and actually I want to see artist's name more convenient than it is now. 

And it looks like an app for some mobile device with big buttons, pics, fonts, spaces between words, but it's useless on desktop, I have a mouse instead of fingers, I want to see more useful info. Friends activity takes too much space, I want to hide it.

Thank u

[Annoyed12342r]

How is it that you consistently remove features and make the user experience worse every year?

The new update is trash and you should feel bad about it

[Spokice]

Having trouble with Spotify "Show desktop overlay when using media keys" feature?

This problem has happened to me recently.

I decide to update Spotify (Windows 10 Store version) to Spotify (official web downloadable option)

My surprise was that: "Show desktop overlay when using media keys" feature, don't appear in preferences. So I couldn't turn off the media overlay notification.

I looked to the Spotify community for help to find a solution to this problem, but no luck.

So I had to find a solution on my own, and luckily I found one.

So it occurred to me to install an old version of Spotify that has the desired option working. And I searched into Spotify directory for preset changes.

Solution

1) Go to Spotify install directory:

C:\Users\"your user"\AppData\Roaming\Spotify\Users

Then open the folder named with your Spotify ID:

and open the archive named "prefs" with notepad

Copy this line:

ui.system_media_controls_enabled=false

and paste at the ends of lines inside "prefs" archive.

Example

app.player.volume=?????
audio.play_bitrate_non_metered_migrated=true
audio.play_bitrate_enumeration=4
audio.normalize_v2=false
audio.sync_bitrate_enumeration=4
ui.system_media_controls_enabled=false

And that's all, Notification are gone.

Note: To reactivate the notification, just change false for True.

I hope this help to anyone's that may have this issue.

Plan

Premium

Country

Chile

Operating System

Windows 10, 20H2.

SO Build: 19042.870

My Question or Issue

After update Spotify and made a clean install "Show desktop overlay when using media keys" feature is not showing in preferences.

[lblackwelluk]

I've already moved to another platform, so I don't think this feedback will be worth much. I only keep coming back to check in hopes that the gutting of the very functional desktop app would be reversed.

Never once has it been publicly acknowledged that forcing users into a beta test is unethical. It's frustrating and infuriating. It has inevitably tainted the feedback you receive, clogging it with complaints instead of being a streamlined and helpful experience.

Worse yet, it's caused users to leave with their money. How does that help Spotify? Put it in a spreadsheet. You want feedback, but by forcing people into a beta you get poor feedback and ultimately less money. Just engage people for brief periods, then release them and grab more test subjects. I was stuck for months and months, exhausting anything I had to say, and ultimately exhausting all good will and faith.

This was a loss so many times over.

[drhumr]

It will change, eventually. You're not missing out, though, it's garbage. Someone has done a very half-assed job. Seriously considering switching to Apple Music.