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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[arielfmdp]

I need a way to downgrade Spotify's desktop app, please ! this update is terribly inconvenient. It is wasting me a lot of time, besides not being at all satisfied with the changes.

[spokify]

@arielfmdp - Unfortunately, there is no easy way to downgrade. I tried uninstalling this latest version and installing an older version I had saved, but ultimately it did not matter. Spotify simply updated right away. I wish I had an even older version available from 2020 to try, but I do not.

@dan - Well, I unfortunately have had to stop updating my playlists, as I am unable to put songs where I want them. Here is an update of a few issues I have run into (Windows 10 v1909):

• Drag and drop have a couple of bugs I’ve noticed:
• HUGE: If I select multiple songs in a playlist, and drag those selected songs to a new position in the playlist, the song order changes to a new random order, sometimes off a little, sometimes off a lot!
• Dragging songs up to the top of a playlist is slow. Dragging songs down to the bottom of a playlist stops working once it reaches the bottom of what is visible on the screen – that is, it does not start autoscrolling.
• HUGE: The history and copy paste are really messed up. I am not sure I can describe what happens...I was unable to add new songs to a playlist, and also keep the order of the songs that I wanted. So I selected all of the songs, about 10+, then hit the 'delete' key on my keyboard. A warning popped up letting me know I would have to add the songs again if I proceeded, and so I clicked remove. Although I've done this numerous times since this latest update, this time, THE SONGS DID NOT GO AWAY. Instead, a song I actually wanted to remain that was at the bottom of the playlist, disappeared. Noticing this, I went to Ctrl-Z to see if I could make the song reappear. Instead, duplicates of the songs I tried to delete (they were still in the clipboard) were pasted into the playlist at the top, in an even different order. Eventually I decided to select a whole bunch of duplicates and right-click, remove, which worked, but which leads me to the next issue:
• Right-click and left-click remove, does NOT do the same thing as pressing delete on the keyboard. However they SHOULD do exactly the same thing, just as they did in the past. Perhaps I should read the engineering blog, as I am curious as to why code isn’t simply being reused. Did we write new code to fix the delete but not working, instead of just calling the same code that is called when a user right-clicks and left-clicks remove? I'm sure there is a good reason why because Spotify is one of the best developed apps out there, I just want to understand.
• I am constantly having to click on the search button. When I do, it pops up at the top. Since the code is already there, can we please add a setting to have the search box permanently stay up top, always ready for input like before?  
• When I leave a playlist by clicking on a new playlist, and return to the previous playlist using the arrow keys at the top of the desktop app, I am taken to a random position in the first playlist, instead of the position I was at when I was last at that playlist.
• Whenever I click on a playlist, I am always taken to the top of the playlist, instead of the last position I was at, as was done in previous versions. I know this sounds like a duplicate to the above, but it is not! 🙂
• Paste only places songs at the bottom of a playlist, instead of where you want them, and Cut does not work at all. Dragging is not currently a workaround, as it changes the song order, and takes very long.
• Would be nice to have a setting where we can choose a preference of pasting songs either to the top or to the bottom of a playlist, if no specific position in the playlist has been pre-selected before the paste. I have noticed that some people want to paste at the bottom, while others prefer the top.
• The reason most of the above matters, is because since there is no ‘lock’ functionality when editing a playlist, there has to be a workaround to prevent spamming listeners with notifications of songs being added. By lock, I mean that any listener would listen to the state of the playlist at the time of the lock, and then those listeners would be notified of songs added after we unlocked the playlist, and the change would then become visible/public. One workaround is that you can maintain a separate private playlist where you can gather the songs you’d like to add to the ‘real/main’ playlist, and then paste all of the songs at once when you’re ready, thus reducing the amount of notifications that a listener has to experience.

[ELFanatic]

@spokify

Try this https://community.spotify.com/t5/Community-Blog/The-New-Desktop-App/bc-p/5187062/highlight/true#M195...

[spokify]

@ELFanatic - I literally just found that post seconds ago and it works! Thank you so much for referencing it

@arielfmdp - I stand corrected. Please see the post that ELFanatic just referenced

[zenpop]

Pure horror. The worst. No words for the magnitude of this fail.