Clearing Play Queue

[Hogg]

I'm sure this topic has been covered dozens of times by now but it seems like there's new behavior now.  It was annoying as hell that you couldn't remove songs from the queue if you hadn't technically "queued" them to begin with.  Now, even when you finish listening to an album or any selection you play without queueing, it re-lists all the tracks from the album back in the queue!  What the hell is going on?  This basically means I can never empty my queue the way it is right now.  Am I missing something here?   

[KS2Problema]

Hey, thanks!

That should be a big help.


I should also say, on rereading my earlier message that, er, ahem, I had Spotify's 'play-all-at-same-volume' option turned on, inducing a little ear-pleasing compression -- not to mention evening up the levels -- the wildly varied levels between tracks (without out it) can be a REAL pain if you mix older releases with new, post-Skrillex/Death Magnet super-squashed stuff and many 'remasters' from the last decade and change.

That said, I'm usually listening to 'properly' mastered stuff that plays nice with other properly mastered stuff -- and don't like using automatic level-compression because it does change the sound, it's not what was intended. And, in the case of modern, already-squashed stuff, it makes it just that much more compressed. Still -- it is VERY handy to have when you need it. It's a plus for Spot.

[Hogg]

I love that the status of this is set to "solved" for some reason.  As someone mentioned, picking an empty playlist now just leads to a message telling you there are no available tracks.  When will the madness end?

[KS2Problema]

😉

Trust me, this is so much better than Beats Music support. Oh. My. 

[kelleandsteve]

Create the new play list named Clear Queue. It will give you an error message if you leave it empty. Put One song in it then right click on the Clear Queue playlist and click on "Choose as current playlist". When the one song appears in the screen, delete it. This should work at least for every New session you listen. In other words , every new time you open Spotify, if you encounter this problem, you may have to Repeat the above steps, which only takes 5 seconds. I know it's not ideal, but it will solve the problem so you can better enjoy Spotify!

Steve

[jackdesert]

Here's what works for me:

1. Click on the top song in the playlist. (Mine highlights to a light grey)
2. While holding down the SHIFT key, click on the bottom song in the playlist.
3. Press the DELETE key on your keyboard.

[Jordi]

@jackdesert  Or just press ctrl(or cmd)-A 🙂

[KS2Problema]

That (and ctrl/cmd-A delete) only works on the green/yellow items with dots in the queue -- and it works more or less as you'd expect. (This is using the downloadable desktop player in Win 7.)  (The to-be-played items are yellow, with the currently playing track full green.)

However, there are a number of other tracks that are white and have check marks or pluses (presumably for favoriting/not). THOSE cannot be selected or deleted -- but they will play like other tracks if there are no green tracks in the queue. You can't delete them

The empty playlist trick seems to work -- but leaves the current  (green) track in the queue. If you let that play, as soon as it gets to the end, it seems to instantly pull inthe  other (white) content even if you had 'blanked it out' with an empty playlist.

If you do a search and click on one song, it loads that (in green) and then a whole bunch of other tracks (in white). When the one in green is done, it moves on to the next white one. If you load an album, it loads the album as yellow tracks in the queue.

You can delete the yellow tracks -- but there is no way to remove the white ones (the delete option is grayed out on the rt-clk menu) while the current track is playing -- so there's no way to keep the darn thing from playing everything. The only way I can find is to make a blank playlist the current playlist -- but that STILL doesn't get rid of the 'current' track -- and if you let it play out-- all of a sudden, new white tracks appear... 

I MUST be missing something! It's utterly nonsensical behavior.

I'm hardly a new subscription stream user.

This is the SEVENTH subscription stream service I've used since ~2005 -- and, with the exception of  the woebegone Beats Music (which has no queue at all), Spot has the wackiest, hardest to suss play queue I've ever used. In fact, until Spotify, I've never had any problems figuring out a play queue ever. 

[user-removed]

Try putting a really short song in that blank playlist you were using to clear the queue, and then double click and run it. Once that single song in the blank playlist is finished only that song should remain in the play queue with no new content trying to reload in again. It would seem the blank playlists workaround to get the play queue to empty has become non working again. I have now done this a few times with a blank playlist with a really short song and it seems to empty it with only that song left over after it finishes. This leaves me able to now queue up what I wish into the queue to rearrange and play how I wish, as yellowed track titles are movable and deletable in the queue as you stated.

[KS2Problema]

Ah! Thanks! That works, although, as you note, does leave that short song queued up and ready to play -- but NOT removable!

We must surely be doing 'something wrong' -- approaching this in a way it's not intended to be used -- because I can't think of why on earth anyone would want some of these bizarre, hard-to-fathom behaviors.

The way the queue 'works' is pretty much a deal-killer for me, I'm afraid.

Some very nice things about Spot as I noted, but, man, this queue behavior is just too weird. I'm almost certain to stick with the other service I've been on since just before MOG started shutting down. (That service is from a large, very well-known search and OS company, for those wondering. It's not ideal, but the queue offers much greater flexibility, has play next -- which is invaluable to me, the way I tend to deal with music queues through the day -- and, while it has its quirks, generally just makes more sense to me as a longtime music player and music subcription user.)

[user-removed]

Ok if you do not want that one song left in the queue delete it from the playlist before it finishes playing some users have stated this removes it and the play queue is blank.

[jackdesert]

@KS2Problema

The white ones appear to be the "currently playing" set, as opposed to the "queued up for later" set. The white "currently playing" set will disappear as soon as you select something to currently play.

@spotify

Please make it clearer how these different actions work

[KS2Problema]

The first time I tried deleting the 'remaining' song just now, there was no delete option but I tried again (for the life of me I can't figure what I did differently) and this time there was a delete option.

Once I had an empty playlist  and saved it, I could then clear all the stuff ouf of the 'queue' by making the blank play queue current. 

SOMETIMES that works to blank the queue. Sometimes it blanks everything but the first track. And sometimes it leaves the queue just as it was.

For gosh sake, is there any consistency in the way this thing works? Apparently not.

And now it absolutely will not allow me to select the shuffle button under any circumstances!?!? 

Something must surely be broken. 

How could tens of millions of people be using this? Are they all mobile users and that works OK? (I don't have the mobile app.)

Once I read in the FAQ or other docs that the browser version uses lo fi, low bandwight streams, I installed the downloadable desktop player. Maybe IT is broken [no maybe there, far as I'm concerned] but the mobile app(s) are OK?

 

UPDATE: If you put a set of tracks into a blank queue (if you're lucky enough to get one) then the top ('current') track  turns green (even if not playing). The others are yellow. You can delete the yellow ones but not (usually) the green (although I was able to somehow at least once). 

BUT you can put the play cursor near the end of tohe track and let it 'play out' and THEN your queue will be empty. 

Easy. bwahahahaha

Anyhow, very frustrating. 

The second most frustrating subscription service of the 7 I've used since 2005. (Beats is most frurstrating, since it doesn't even HAVE a queue and can't even deselect songs from album play except by manual skpping when I last used it this spring.)

[tourmi]

PLAY QUEUE AUTOMATICALLY REPOPULATES.  The "create empty play list" solution is not working for me. I created an empty playlist and chose it as the current playlist. That removed all but the current track in the play queue. Unfortunately, when I then deleted or played that track, all the tracks in the previous list re-appear.  My play queue used to stay clear once all tracks were played. This problem began when I tried using one of the Spotify Apps and played some music from one of the lists there. Since then, I can't stop the automatic re-appearance of tracks once the final item in the play queue has ended. Many thanks in advance.

[tourmi]

SOLVED! After reading more entries on this topic, I solved the automatic play entries in the play queue by creating a new playlist with only 1 short song in it, playing that song and deleting the playlist while the song was playing. At least I think that's what I did!  Then I deleted what was left of the short song and the play queue remained empty. However, I kept that short track in a different play list so I can re-use it. It'll work with any track, of course. Thanks to all who weighed in on this topic in the past, which helped me a lot.

[XScL]

It seems now you have to add a song into a playlist to play it. Which is understandable, but annoying, much prefered it when you could play a playlist with 0 songs in it, to wipe the play queue... 

[Peter__]

As a work around from a bug report I filed yesterday you can clear the play queue if you go to:
- Messages tab.
- Open a conversation.
- Press the play button on one of the user pictures in the conversation thread.

[tourmi]

Thank you for your reply, Peter. I haven't tried your most recent fix yet since things are currently working nicely.

[Hogg]

How is this topic set to solved when the only solutions are weird workarounds that change with every new version of Spotify they release?    

[WeberGregory]

That worked but it shouldn't. The queue should is the very heart of a music playing system. It should be elegant, flawless and easy to use. Spotify developers! Please adopt the perspective of Steve Jobs and get this thing working right.

[KS2Problema]

Google gets the player and queue SO much more 'right.'

There are a lot of good things about Spotify, but, where my rubber hits the road, G's All Access serves me a lot better. Mostly.

That said, don't take it from me. Everyone has different priorities. Most of these have a free trial. (That said, Google's interface has its own quirks and can take a minute or two to suss. Or a couple of days, maybe. LOL. But, that said, I still haven't figured out Spot's queue system.)

Oh well, no one said the 21st century would be perfect. Or did they? They promised a lot. We thought we'd get flying cars and we're still waiting to get a good personal jukebox system. LOL