Give us your feedback - 0.9.0

[Richard]

Hey everyone,

Following on from our previous thread on 0.8.8, we've started up this thread to gather feedback from you on 0.9.0.

We want to hear what you love, what you hate, and any other emotions you have towards the app.

You'll find a list of everything that's changed in the app in our release notes here. And we'll be keeping this post updated with the changes we're making, along with where you can give us further feedback.

What we've changed:

1. The app should be a lot quicker now. So if you were affected by any slow behaviour previously, this shouldn't be an issue any more.

2. Clicking anywhere in the Now Playing box, rather than just the album art, will bring you straight to the song. This was reported here.

Where you can give us further feedback with your comments and kudos:

1. Change the white interface [we're currently reaching to users about this directly]

2. Changes to the activity feed -

     i. Bring back the old activity feed

     ii. The Favourites feature

     iii.Greater control of content in the feed: 

3. Bring back the total playlst length:

4. Filter option on artist pages

5. Go back to the old artist layout 

6. Ability to view all Facebook friends in the Follow tab:

7. View all playlist followers: 

8. Block/Remove followers 

9. Separate artists and friends

10. Remove 'who to follow'

11. Revert the font back to the original size (or provide an option to do so)

12. Restore 'View as Album List'

Thanks for all your support. We appreciate that there are a lot of changes going on at the moment and it can be a bumpy road at times. But we're confident that you'll like where we're going.

All your opinions matter and go into making Spotify the best product it can be. Keep it coming!

[user-removed]

Horrible change to the fonts. Your company does nothing else than **bleep**ing things up, it's embarrassing.

[Madferret]

Another horrible update... I cancelled my premium service. These updates are not improvements and I don't like being forced into them. 

Please- make the interface buttons LARGER. Everything is so small. The scrollbars are not wide enough, the search field and font is too small. The Back button is stupidly placed in the top left corner like Netscape web browser from 1997. Please add backspace key support to go to previous page, or mouse gestures. I should also be able to customize font sizes to make them more readable. The font padding on the new version is way too much. The interface needs to be a lot more dynamic and customizeable.  

Please make my playlist sort in order of Most recently added song FIRST-- why did the default sort change in the new versions? Why would I want to scroll down my entire playlist to the bottom just to get to my new songs? The iPhone app has this same problem 

Please add TOUCH SUPPORT. Amazingly, the Spotify PC program still has NO touch support and there is still no Windows 8 app.

Why is it that when I press X to close on the Spotify window, it doesn't close- it minimizes. This is the purpose of the minimize button- why are there two buttons that do the same thing? No other piece of software on my computer behaves this way.

[Thevstad]

A thread for wishing back the old fonts was made here:

http://community.spotify.com/t5/ideas/v2/ideapage/blog-id/ideaexchange/article-id/24741

Feel free to give your kudos 🙂

[jkospotify]

dear spotify crew, let's make a simple deal:

 just let me know when 0.8.5 is back, and then and only then, I will be back on spotify.

bye. thanks.

[DennyEMufc]

Read my report on the DOWNGRADE PERMENTLY thread, get the zip fix, and reinstall the 0851356 FEB 2013, its without all the latest rooster ups, i tried it and im now resynching all my music where i want it !

[xbrett83]

It's still absurdly slow at start up. There's something fundamentally wrong with Spotify's launch up it seems. Also it's been crashing a few times which is something I've not experienced with previous updates.

[olejon]

To me it seems like v 0.9 mainly fixes/introduces bugs & removes features. I don't really understand the bump from 0.8 to 0.9, when the previous minor updates have only been changing the number 0.8.8.xxx. I would say the jump from 0.8.5 to 0.8.8 was much bigger.

Spotify's recent moves have been: Making the desktop client less enjoyable for many (which is evident by this and previous threads), and at the same time releasing a Windows preview which is basically the web player in disguise (you can download it here if you want to try it), forcing it upon unaware users without any warning or information that they are not getting the regular desktop client.

Since I don't really thrust Spotify in communicating with users before doing sudden changes, it is important that as many as possible try the Windows preview so you can express your opinion before this suddenly may be the only choice.

I don't think this really is the case, but one conspiracy theory comes to mind: The desktop client team and the web player team have agreed to making the desktop client worse and worse, so that when they suddenly ditch it (without any warning) for the web player only, people won't scream as much.

Downgrade instructions for all platforms:

• How to downgrade to an older version and block auto-updating on Windows
• How to downgrade to an older version and block auto-updating on Linux
  
• How to downgrade to an older version and block auto-updating on on OS X (Mac)

PS: The desktop team should learn from the web player team when it comes to being present here at the forums. Even though they mainly responds to positive feedback, at least they seem to be present. Here we are lucky if a moderator responds.

I hope we can keep this thread free from hate and "f*** you Spotify", etc and make it about expressing our opinions in a serious and constructive manner. Most of us were satisfied with previous versions, and it is important to express that, or Spotify may think that they can just switch us all to the web player and everybody will be happy (check out the preview mentioned above).

[Benkaboi]

Just came here to remind you that Spotify crew are complete *bleep* and worthless at what they are doing!! I sure hope that your decisions lately will have a really negative impact on the amount of users that uses this service.

[miskidomleka]

I am not sure if anyone already reported it in this thread, I don't have time to read all >180 posts.

One of serious bugs in 0.9.0 128 is that the cache location reverts to the default location on overy program restart. This is causes all ofline files to have to be resynchronized. It is also very detrimrntal for those who prefer to keep the cache on a secondary large drive, not on their system drive. Especially if the system drive is a relatively small SSD.

Also, I am curious why Spotify executable installs into AppData\Roaming folder not into Progam Files(x86), thus breaking a well-established convention.

[mofucius]

There seems to be no way to load the program in offline mode. it keeps asking for the log in when I need to be able to load the program in offline mode to listen to the offline songs I synced. We need an ETA for a fix, this service is dead in the water until these very simple issues that never were issues gets fixed.

[TheCDay]

Got a responce to my help ticket

"I am sorry to hear that you have problems with the latest update, let's get it sorted.

No problem, I've reset the offline devices for you.

We don't officially suggest users to change cache location as it might cause application crash or instability."

...then why is it an option? And  system instabilty due to lack of disk space is ok ?

[JMillsPaysBills]

I don't understand the internal process within Spotify for upgrading. Do you guys just randomly decide that certain features should be removed and then call it an update?

Why on God's green earth would you guys decide that playlist album view was unnecessary? Was it really hurting anything leaving the code in the software? Was it screwing something up? Was it causing some other bug? Do you guys have to charge some extra fee to display album art? The latter is the only plausible reason I could see for removing it. It wouldn't surprise me if the music industry tried charging for some BS thing like that.

This update is a load of crap. There was nothing wrong with my previous version. The fact that I can't turn off auto updates is also a load of crap. I don't care what your software license agreement is, Spotify is not the only streaming service out there. Frankly, there isn't anything keeping me tied to Spotify.

Good day.

[miskidomleka]

We don't officially suggest users to change cache location as it might cause application crash or instability."

Spotify,mthat's plain stupid.  You give the option, which is very useful for many: people with SSD system drives, or just with large secondary drives. And you say don't use it?

[Benkaboi]

Do you seriously have any respect or confidence left in their claims and ability to accomplish something usefull and stable anymore?

[musicologist09]

This morning, I posted the following to a different thread. Despite following a moderator's link saying to report this particular issue on the thread to which I first posted, the moderators then locked that thread, disallowing additional comments. So, I'll try again and repost after being redirected to this thread. (Seems like a pretty funny way to run a message board, no?)

        -------------------

Has anybody been following up on the slow-to-load problem and/or other application hangs? I'm running Spotify 0.9.0.117, Windows 7, SP1, dual core, 4gb ram. Quite consistently when I first load up Spotify at the start of the day, I get this:

Description:
A problem caused this program to stop interacting with Windows.

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: AppHangB1
Application Name: spotify.exe
Application Version: 0.9.0.117
Application Timestamp: 51667286
Hang Signature: c58e
Hang Type: 0
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Hang Signature 1: c58e6b17f3044071891ff1cdfd5f1fe5
Additional Hang Signature 2: 817a
Additional Hang Signature 3: 817abf148b46b7446da05af0938621c5
Additional Hang Signature 4: c58e
Additional Hang Signature 5: c58e6b17f3044071891ff1cdfd5f1fe5
Additional Hang Signature 6: 817a
Additional Hang Signature 7: 817abf148b46b7446da05af0938621c5

Sometimes it will just work itself out on its own. Othertimes, it requires a force quit and will then work fine on reloading the application. And yes, I have made sure that spotify is ignored by my virus software and allowed by my firewall. Hardware acceleration is turned off in options. My spotify is not linked to facebook or anything else. Local file folders are deselected in preferences too.

Any other suggestions? Is this a known bug? Is anything being done? I know that your release notes claim this problem is fixed, but it is clearly not fixed, at least not for me.

Thanks in advance for anybody's input!

[Turnus]

View as Album List.

This has to be the most horrifying omission I have EVER seen in a product update. 

The greatest strength of Spotify was always its emphasis on albums, and listening to full albums one at a time. It was this focus that put Spotify head and shoulders above the rest of every other alternative music streaming service available!

So why would you remove something that directly supported this? 

Should have seen it coming. Every recent update that came out, had to manually re-check View as Album List for all my album playlists.

Please bring View as Album List back!

[jeanbalully]

Album View (crtl+G)

I really need it. It's very conveniant. I'm listening to classical music, and metadata are really perfectible on spotify. A visual representation of the album really helps me to find what I need in my playlist. Please restore this function.

[gigiriva]

I'm wondering which feature will be removed in the next version... shuffle? related artists page? playlists? MUSIC?

[fufuge]

Updates, until recently, have been rather good. Now, the last one is a big step backwards (font size and now Album view...). Luckily I found out how to revert to an old version and stop automatic update fro Spotify. It's a shame to be force to do that...

Big failure on this update.

[ProdRM]

Again, Spotify is slow as hell and takes forever to launch. And once started, playlists take forever to load... 

Oh, and although I uncheck the option to load Spotify with Windows, guess what, it launches with Windows every goddamn time.

I think if it were not for my playlists I would gladly move elsewhere... (although apparently Spotify couldn't care less).