So where has my library gone?

[QuirkBit]

Updated Spotify desktop client yesterday (about says v0.9.8.258) and the 'Library' option has dissappeared and been replaced by a rather useless and blank looking Your Music > Songs / Albums / Artists. Also I cannot star anything, a plus seems to have replaced the star. The Library was my goto screen on spotify as it contained all my local files and playlists....Spotify has rendered itself rather useless for me in 1 update, unless I go and manually create a library playlist which I would then have to manually update each time I added new music.

Please advise how to get the library back or a suitable workaround which provides the same functionality. Also, why the hell were users not notified of this big change?

[Sam27]

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@mdewater wrote:

As for how anyone can think the Library isn't essential - it all comes down to different types of users. The majority of users in the beta test were big, hardcore, power users. Not many casual users, as many in this thread here are.

To use myself as an example - I think of music in terms of Artist>Album>Song. I VERY rarely think in terms of playlists. So naturally, the Your Music function works great for users like me. I would never use the Library because I have so much music in it that it becomes unmanageable. It's too big to quickly find individual songs, and I don't EVER shuffle my music. I choose an album and listen all the way through, or literally pick and choose each song by hand as I go. I personally have a hard time believing that so many people do use Library (even though obviously people do). So, with a group of like-minded users like myself doing the beta testing for this service on top of the fact that statistically the Library doesn't get used very much, it's easy to see why it would unfortunately get overlooked. Same with starred.

Hopefully they figure out a way to make all kinds of users happy.

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This really is interesting.  It's great to see the scope of the different users out there.   Just like you, mdewater, I tend to think of music in an Artist/Album by Year/Song basis.  When I rip CDs onto my computer I always change the title to include the year (for example '1968 - The White Album'). That's why library was so functional to me.  I could arrange it by artist and then everything would be organized Artist/Album by Year and the songs would be listed as part of the albums, obviously.  As such, the library function gave me a full overview of all my music and organized it the way I wanted. 

At the same time, I could simply press shuffle on that list and hear it all in random order, if I so chose.  As someone in radio, I often used this shuffle button to give me inspiration for a show.  I'd play my library on shuffle and make note of when songs seemed to flow into one another, or had similar keys, lyrical themes, etc.  I doubt many people use the Library function for the same reason but it's still something I miss, and it was my main reason for using Spotify.  Sure there was a lot there, some of which don't warrant repeat listens (such as introductions to live songs), but I'd just skip over them if the time came.

At the same time, I understand the playlist mentality that some people hold.  I sometimes make 'driving music' or 'rainy day' playlists, and of course I use them to store completed radio shows (which are culled from the Library function).  But more often, I use playlists to group similar artists' music together.  For example, if I want all the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young-related albums in one place (so Hollies, Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, CSN, CSNY, C&N, Stills-Young Band, all the solo material in chronological order--cuz that's how my brain works), I just head over to the library, highlight all the songs I want, and put them in the playlist.

It's been very helpful in many respects to have the Library function and, like many others in this thread, it took years for me to build mine up and I'm a bit disappointed to see it go -- especially considering I used it as my go-to method for preparing radio shows.  I think it served all kinds of users well:  the casual ones, and also the music obsessed power users.  I hope it can be instated again.

[LaRube]

Agreed Sam27...

[vzsn4q]

Any chance of finding a persons library songs after the update?

I would NEVER have updated had it be known the libary which hours was spent on would be wiped.

When you start taking away features I use I start looking for other places to listen.

[waterox]

In addition the new design is totally lacking in any kind of visual hierarchy (graphic design term for how we can quickly scan a screen and distinguish different information). It's just a mess of black and white. Hope you're reading this and not just taking offense spotify. Many of us invested hundreds of pounds already in your service. Of course you have to compete with google but I cant think of any reason to remove the library even if you want new users to do everything by artist, album, song. Could it be something to do with encouraging a sense of ownership of specific albums so that the revenue is a bit more focused? Or having people discover music through radio (so its including newer stuff that labels are whoring) Who knows. Anyway, please find it in your hearts to do the right thing and give us the full product back.

I finally had to restart spotify and now have the crappy new version on my desktop. For a second the library link appeared with the new black colorscheme. I'm pretty sure it's just a few lines of code to reinstate it. 

[Peter__]

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@vzsn4q wrote:

Any chance of finding a persons library songs after the update?

I would NEVER have updated had it be known the libary which hours was spent on would be wiped.

When you start taking away features I use I start looking for other places to listen.

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Any tracks you had in your library will still be on your account after the update. Library was essentially just a combined view of all of the tracks in all of your playlists and your local files - so they should still be in their original locations. 

[masterp123]

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Peter wrote:

Any tracks you had in your library will still be on your account after the update. Library was essentially just a combined view of all of the tracks in all of your playlists and your local files - so they should still be in their original locations. 

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And that's exactly what made the library so necessary.  If I own the digital copies of all the albums of one of my favorite artists from before 2012 locally but have their newest 2014 album only on spotify playlists, I want to be able to go to "My Library" and type in that artist name to pull up EVERY song they have (not just the local files or vice versa.)  Also, I don't want to have to search through all my old playlists, local files, and "saved" songs to find a song that I like when the library feature would allow every song to be conveniently located in one place.

[steve_sjbc]

Please bring back the library option.  My music seems pointless to me.  I don't listen to the same few tracks over and over again and I could simply choose them from my playlists when I want to listen to them.  Sometimes it's nice to listen to all my music on shuffle when I want a change and I'm not sure of what I want to listen to.

I really don't understand why it was removed?

I am not willing to move all my music into one folder that seems horribly counter productive.  Is there any way to disable future updates because they are often buggy and end up having usefull features removed rather than improving the service!

[Peter__]

You can *almost* recreate the library (which is what I have done). If you make a new playlist folder (File > New Playlist Folder), then add all of your playlists into that one folder, including a playlist for your local files (which is fine for me as they don't get updated often) then the Folder view of that playlist folder is essentially the same as library (apart from it doesn't include starred, but I have most of those tracks in other playlists too).

Not perfect, but it does work.

[repete7]

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@Peter wrote:
You can *almost* recreate the library (which is what I have done). If you make a new playlist folder (File > New Playlist Folder), then add all of your playlists into that one folder, including a playlist for your local files (which is fine for me as they don't get updated often) then the Folder view of that playlist folder is essentially the same as library (apart from it doesn't include starred, but I have most of those tracks in other playlists too).

Not perfect, but it does work.

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Other advantage of your method is that the folder view doesn't show duplicates.  I tried adding tracks from playlists to one big playlist and ended up with a mess of duplicates.  Adding the playlists to a folder instead avoids that problem.  Thanks Peter!

[clapton5000]

Except that many of us have more than 10,000 songs, which is the most that a playlist can hold.

[Peter__]

Hence why it is a work around, you could always break a large playlist up into a few smaller ones. As far as I know (although I've never had enough tracks to test) the "Folder view" doesn't have a limit.

[biglarry5]

The stars have been (sort of) replaced by check marks, but Spotify believes they can overcome their users' hue and cry about this issue by lexical creativity. They have the Starred button all right, but no stars.

More importantly, the check marks don't behave like stars any more. Once you starred a song anywhere in the system in the past, it was carved in stone across the whole website. Just one example: I have a couple of dozen albums from a certain artist in a single playlist. Almost all of the stars have vanished, and when I click on Albums or Artists, there is ONE SINGLE track in those folders from that artist. I wrote to Spotify about it, but they, like good little corporate prevaricators and obfuscators, are trying to convince me that this doesn't happen. I asked them to check my account. No response, of course. 

Because of the newly-instituted song limit, my Songs and Starred folders have tracks from the first half of the alphabet, followed by a huge gap, and then there are a few recently added albums starting with a "t". If I had the time and patience to count those songs, I'm pretty sure the count wouldn't be even close to 10,000 - not because I don't have tracks in excess of that number - but because their counter is a pretty blunt tool.

If the company had blackmailed me and said, "O.K., the free lunch is over, now you have to pay up", I would've gladly done so because of the time invested in my collection. Of course, this would happen only under the condition that the service remains as reliable as before. But no, they missed the opportunity to make extra money from thousands of users like me and instituted a pointless, infuriating change that might lead to their demise.

[cookie]

I've manually put all songs from loads of playlists into 'Songs'. Still I can't find some songs there, when I'm looking for them. For example songs I've been listening to on Spotify since 2008. I'm sure I have them in a playlist somewhere. As I can't find them in the 'Your Music'/'Songs' section, I have to spend time looking through several playlists, trying to find them. Most of the time I give up and have to just use the search function, as I did when I added the song years ago, but then I'm not sure I'll find the right recording. I'm listening a lot to old jazz and soul recordings, spent a lot of time collecting versions I love, rare recordings and so on. It's not easy to find them again (they are not in the 'popular' list and I don't like 'Greatest Hits' albums that very often shows up (hundreds of them)  in the list, if it's a well known artist). I'm now talking about the songs I remember that i've put in playlists- there are ofc thousands of songs I've added that I can't keep in my head (am I supposed to do that?). With the Library I could just check all songs I added by an artist and get reminded. I also enjoyed getting reminded by putting my Library on shuffle and listen to songs of all genres in it.  I seriously don't know how use Spotify anymore, aside from using the search function to find new songs (although I don't know where to save them, as I'm not sure they will stay in the 'Songs' list if I add them there, but anyway) or listening to my own playlists, which is great of course. But I still don't understand why the Library function is taken away. It's so stupid it almost makes me laugh. Is this the beginning of the end of Spotify? A way to make people slowly getting used to not using Spotify so much?

[andyrau]

The libaray function still exists - just works a bit differently now. I think it is an improvement.

1. Just drag and drop all of you playlists into the "Songs" area under the new "Your Music" section.
2. The other alternative is to client the new "plus" icon next to the song (one at a time)
3. This takes care of duplicates - as in, it doesn't add the same song to your libaray if it has already been added.
4. The next time you want to add a new song to your playlists, you have to do 2 things:

• Click the "plus" icon next to the song - this will add it to your library
• Then add it to your playlist like usual

Why is this better?

• Now whenever you the Sprotify search results or you view someone else's playlist, you will see a check / tick icon next to the song if you already have it in your library.
• Before this, you had to search your library to see if you wanted to know if you had a particular song in your library.
• I had to do this everytime I wanted to add a song to a new playlist to prevent adding duplicates
• There was no indication within a playlist to let you know that a song was already part of your library
• Now with the new check / tick icon, you can know this at a glance!

[passingbat]

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@andyrau wrote:

The libaray function still exists - just works a bit differently now. I think it is an improvement.

1. Just drag and drop all of you playlists into the "Songs" area under the new "Your Music" section.
2. The other alternative is to client the new "plus" icon next to the song (one at a time)
3. This takes care of duplicates - as in, it doesn't add the same song to your libaray if it has already been added.
4. The next time you want to add a new song to your playlists, you have to do 2 things:

• Click the "plus" icon next to the song - this will add it to your library
• Then add it to your playlist like usual

Why is this better?

• Now whenever you the Sprotify search results or you view someone else's playlist, you will see a check / tick icon next to the song if you already have it in your library.
• Before this, you had to search your library to see if you wanted to know if you had a particular song in your library.
• I had to do this everytime I wanted to add a song to a new playlist to prevent adding duplicates
• There was no indication within a playlist to let you know that a song was already part of your library
• Now with the new check / tick icon, you can know this at a glance!

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Library included local songs; Your Music at this current time doesn't. They've indicated that this will be fixed, but how long will it take and why was the Library remooved before Your music had all the previous functionality of the Library? A completely stupid decision.

[WColt]

I joined Spotify in 2008 and had years of stuff all saved in the Library, almost all of which was added off Spotify rather than local.    Updated the other week and found it has all disappeared.  

So reading this thread, it looks like i have to manually go and find all that stuff all over again and add it again.   Doesn't seem like there is a way of retrieving what was saved in there, or am i wrong?

That's pretty rubbish as I didn't save a list of all the tracks in there, so will now struggle to remember them!

[Peter__]

The library tab was just an overview display of all of the content in your playlists and local files (you couldn't ever add things to the library directly). All of the content that was in your library tab will still be where-ever it was being shown from, so most likely in your playlists.

[colake]

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@andyrau wrote:

The libaray function still exists - just works a bit differently now. I think it is an improvement.

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The "my song section" is not an improvement in comparison with the 'old' library. It would have been an improvement and a good replacement if following was implemented:

- Songs from all playlists are added automatically to the my song section.

This is something that existed in the library.  Now you have to add them manually to a playlist AND "my songs".

For playlist you manage by yourself it's only an extra action when you add a song to a plalylist.

But what with playlists from other people you are following?  I don't like the idea that  I have to keep an eye on this lists and that I have to add the songs manually to my songs to be able to include them also.

- Also local files are included automatically to the my song section. 

Again this was somethign that existed in the library but is gone with the "my song" thing.

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1. Just drag and drop all of you playlists into the "Songs" area under the new "Your Music" section.
2. The other alternative is to client the new "plus" icon next to the song (one at a time)
3. This takes care of duplicates - as in, it doesn't add the same song to your libaray if it has already been added.

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You probably don't know but  there is currently a bug so that you are not able to add more then 500 songs at the same time. You don't get any error message you will only notice this after a restart of spotify. 

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Why is this better?

• Now whenever you the Sprotify search results or you view someone else's playlist, you will see a check / tick icon next to the song if you already have it in your library.
• Before this, you had to search your library to see if you wanted to know if you had a particular song in your library.
• I had to do this everytime I wanted to add a song to a new playlist to prevent adding duplicates
• There was no indication within a playlist to let you know that a song was already part of your library
• Now with the new check / tick icon, you can know this at a glance!

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You have now only an indication that a song is added to "my songs". But there is still no option to get a list of playlists a songs is added to.Spotif could have achieved  the same result by adding an icon indicating that a song belongs already to a playlist and if you click on that icon that you see a list of playlist the song is added to.

Only advantage of the "my songs" is that you now can add songs to your collection without adding them to a playlist ... but hey stop didn't that exist already with the "favorites"

And now to really help people who are missing the mix ALL bonus function of the library.  You have nearly the same result if you create a new playlist folder  (ex: All songs") and  move all your playlists and playlist folders in that folder.  Keep in mind that they will be orderd in the order you move them.  Create also a playlist for  your local files and move it in the same folder.  Now you can use the "All songs" folder to get a mix of all your music.  You have following disadvantages: extra click if you want to add a song to one of your existing playlists on all devices where you are using spotify playlists and you still have to add manually new local music.

[steve_sjbc]

nicely written colake.  I agree with everything you stated.  If only updates made applications better or easier for the end user...  Maybe they will do something to rectify it with the next update.  Let's see whether they care about their users opinions or not?

[clapton5001]

Except, of course, for the song limit. A playlist only lets you save 10,000 songs. For anyone with more than 10,000 songs, there is no way to re-create the library.

I have 170,000 songs in my various playlists. and they they used to all be in the library where I could play all my music randomly.