Are there any decent alternatives to the spotify app for macs

[charvolant]

Premium

Australia

Macbook Pro 2016

macOS Catalina

There are a lot of good things to say about spotify. But the desktop app is not one of them. I'm someone who tends to have a queue of stuff that I've found and want to investigate, rather than a set of repeated playlists. The spotify model is good for discovering music but makes the process of listening to it very unpleasant:

• The app will callously blitz the queue of music that I have. I'm extremely nervous of opening it on any other device, in case it makes a hash of whatever I'm doing. But, even if I don't, it may decide to do so, because I deserve to be punished or something. Once gone, it's never coming back.
• Accidentally mis-clicking on a song in the queue will destroy the preceding queue, with no way of recovering it.
• Since the app doesn't connect to Chromecast, I need to run the web app to do so. Ha ha, say goodbye to your queue, worthless scum! However, if I want to order things or do anything more complex, the web app won't let me.
• Generally, managing the queue is an awful experience. For example, it's very hard to re-order things, since drag and drop is the only way and it's quite easy to simply lose things in a long queue.
• It's not really possible to rate songs with anything more than love/not love.
• Nor is it possible to tag songs, albums or artists.

Prior to using spotify, I used amarok (linux) or clementine (mac). These had very good user interfaces. I particularly like amarok's smart playlists, for example.

I'd really like spotify to produce a decent desktop app but, looking through previous attempts to get the company to improve things, I don't expect that it will ever happen. I'd also like to use spotify as a streaming service, rather than try and work around it.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a good music player, with a good persistent queue that will work with spotify?

[Ivan]

Hey there @charvolant, 

Thanks for reaching out to the Community about this. 
 

Spotify constantly strives to improve the user experience with its features and the easiest way to achieve this is by regular app updates. This is why we appreciate you taking the time to share your feelings about the desktop app with the Community. We always take new ideas and feedback into consideration to improve the app. Here you can read more on how ideas work.

We also suggest checking this help article for useful tips on how to submit an idea. As a heads-up, it's good to know that the higher the number of votes an idea gets, the more likely it is for the idea to be implemented 🙂 

Hope this helps. Let us know if you have any more questions. 

[charvolant]

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the reply but my question still stands. Is there any way of not using spotify's apps? I'd prefer not to be dependent on the whims of a group of developers who obviously don't see things the same way I do.

Doug

[MattSuda]

• Since the app doesn't connect to Chromecast, I need to run the web app to do so.

---

Hey @charvolant 

Good news!

You can now find Chromecast in the connect "devices available" menu in the Spotify desktop app and browser web player. Now you can cast your music to Chromecast from the desktop app without having to use the iOS or Android app or web player.

Make sure your Spotify desktop app is up to date

[mickysingh]

There tons of Spotify Alternatives you should be looking for:

1. YouTube Music 

2. Gaana

3. JioSaavn

4. Hungama Music

5. Wynk

[DadIsDoomed]

Hi mate, 

I appreciate that this reply is way late, but had something to say and wanted to add my 10 penneth worth.

Weirdly for 2021, the Spotify app is a disaster, has been for years but Spotify don’t seem to want to fix it despite the lies their reps state to the contrary. The web player is much better, but who wants to rely on a browser when they could use an app? I left Apple Music for Spotify but am seriously considering going back. Apple Music has its problems but at least it’s not an incredibly bloated floundering whale of an app like Spotify. ‘ Slow, slow, slow, slow, slow’ should be the Spotify mantra, that or ‘ Ignore the customers because we are think we are too big to fail’

[modiX91]

@Ivan When do you guys understand that your app is BS? I have bugs with your macOS client for ages and you fail to recognize and fix them. Stop your copy paste behavior, you sound like a robot. Be honest, your app suck, it lacks of tons of features and has so many bugs. People have good suggestions, but you close them, because of lack of interest. Just because 95% of people doesn't care won't mean that there is no pain.

Also please don't start to say to look for an alternative platform, you know that you stand on a monopoly with the biggest variety of music. If you would provide a better common API we would have ton of alternative clients that use Spotify as backend, but we know that you don't like community driven clients that pwn your own terrible app, because it would take control from you.