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New Desktop Experience - your feedback wanted!

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New Desktop Experience - your feedback wanted!

Spotify is testing a new way for you to connect with your music on Desktop. The new desktop experience features an all-new design, streamlined with the Spotify apps on all your devices. 

 

This is a brand-new experience and some parts are still being fine-tuned. Be sure to give feedback with the steps below to let the right folks know what you think could be improved.

 

The other Rock Stars and I got the chance to test the new desktop experience first and now more users will be able to test it out and give their feedback for the team. If you are a passionate Spotify user and would like to join the Rock Star Program and be part of cool experiences like this, then check out this help article.

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How do I know if I’m using the New Desktop Experience?

The new desktop experience is not hard to spot with its new design! Your Library looks like this for example:

Why did the app change? 

This test is rolled out to a specific group of users at this moment. It’s not possible to sign up for this right now, but your interest is really appreciated. If you’re interested in testing out new versions of Spotify before everyone else, check this out: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Answers/How-do-I-become-a-Spotify-Beta-tester/ta-p/4551518

 

If you’re looking for more information about how tests work and about how features are released, take a look here: https://support.spotify.com/article/why-am-i-seeing-different-features-than-my-friends/.

 

How to give feedback?

This thread is your go-to destination for asking questions, getting help for issues you may have, as well as to share your impressions and feedback on this new desktop experience. 

 

Keep in mind that pictures can say a thousand words, so if you have any screenshots of something you’d like to share of your experience be sure to post them here as well! The right teams at Spotify take their time to read the posts in this thread and use your feedback to fine-tune this new experience for everyone.

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Like Prometheus, I am here to bring knowledge to all of you afflicted masses. I have traveled throughout the lands, met with Gian, and he has relayed to me that it is impossible to escape the beta once you have been cursed with it. However, I have found a cure. Move your premium to a different account. I did it and I no longer have the beta, it sucks but it's the only way

I have a suspicion forcing subscribed users to use a beta version with a obvious backtrack in features and interface is borderline, if not actually, illegal. There was no agreement made between Spotify the corporation and the end user, those being paid subscription holders, regarding the beta program. There is a reason companies have opt in testing programs. forcing any kind of change in the software onto one group without their explicit consent, and then refusing. REFUSING. to revert users accounts when they complain is downright evil. you are taking money and not providing the app that was paid for.

Please do not ignore your paying customers here. The artist of a song should remain a separate column in a playlist.
The search bar should be available regardless of which page of Spotify you are on.
One of Spotify's strengths is its current desktop U.I, and it's superiority when compared to other platforms.
In what appears to be most people's opinions, you are butchering the ease of access and usability for desktop users, whilst also becoming more like the competitors you were once far above.

Just to add on to this, I can no longer sort playlists by artist. The ads playing so loud and with increased base (heavy metal doesn't crackle my speakers, but the Mentos ad does? What a sad joke Spotify is.) Not worth my time and certainly not my money. 

While i like the new update as a whole, there is one major problem that I have with it. there is no way, or at least obvious way, to change where files download to. I am trying to move stuff onto a new drive and seemingly can't now. any solutions/help is appreciated.

Currently 25 pages here and the comments are overwhelmingly negative. What an epic failure this update is. What was Spotify thinking? My advice: Talk to some average people before releasing such an update and you will know beforehand that your customers won't like it.

I would also like to add to this post the following issues I have found with the latest release:
- Friend Activity does not refresh or work
- Unable to move a track in a playlist upwards, due to the auto-scroll function no longer working
- Unable to delete a song from a playlist by pressing delete
- Adding a song to a playlist now adds the song to the top and not the bottom, why?
- When returning to a playlist you are listening to, no longer returns you to the song you are listing to in the playlist and you have to scroll down
The UX has been severely impacted with the latest release. I have no idea why this release was rolled out without sufficient testing, or the ability to accept a new release based on whatever improvements (if any) were made. It looks as though a "that will do approach" was taken when developing and testing the new release. Majority of users do not really care if you add a more chocolatey look to the UI if the functionality is affected. The previous release worked perfectly and I can not believe there isn't a rollback option, especially with the amount of bugs this release has.

Spotify on my work computer has also just switched to the new layout and again no way to opt-out of this terrible user experience. What a disastrous update this has been so far.

I hate it. Why change something that works fine? The new update looks like straight ass and takes about 14 years to load anything. About a week ago I deleted over 1,000 songs from my Liked Songs to get some performance back (I'd had 1500, it had been running pretty poorly, this helped), and it worked fine until I opened Spotify this morning and was greeted with this abomination. I'm about to cancel my subscription if I can't figure out how to roll it back. The best part is that before, I could successfully roll the version back using filehippo/filehorse, but I can't even do that now as it seems to be some kind of account-bound issue.

I really dislike the new UI/UX, it has so many flaws. I understand that they want to make 1 app for both desktop, web and android but they should consider the UX consequences of this since there's A LOT of missing features from the new version, as well as other very bad UX changes. I have also noticed a sound quality change, it has become louder and less bassy, terrible in other words. I have discovered a workaround to revert the UI change and I can't stress enough how amazing the older UI actually is!
Please revert!

how does the workaround work? 🙂

- Position in a playlist is not stored when you go to a different page. If you open an album and then go back you're back at the start.

- You can not put playlist URLs in the search bar anymore to open them

- Search bar? How did you decide this is not an integral part of your application? Aren't you pushing music discovery and how does removing the search bar in 90% of the application fit with this?

- You can sort playlist by 'most recently listened' but you can't choose ascending or descending

- When I went to a follower and opened a playlist, the left sidebar greyed out and stayed that way even though I was able to open my playlists.

- Playlist folders are not respected in 'Your Library > Playlists'

- The margin to the right of the volume slider is too small, the playlist name too if you open/slide out the album cover

- The space between letters (kerning) in playlists names differs from none at all in 'La' and 'ET', to like 2mm in 'up' and 'EN'

- 'Private session' option has a smaller font than the other options

- 'ç' in playlist names gets cut off

I hate the new desktop app. If we wanted the web player version we would've just been using the web version.  I can't even sort podcasts by unplayed anymore.  Why take so many features away?

Of all the things I dislike about the new UI, this is probably at the top (the way the albums are listed under each artist).

 

Other gripes:

What happened to the search bar??

After playing a search result song, the queue just gets filled with garbage. Why not just the next song in the search results the way it was before?

Why does the playlist name banner take up most of the screen? Such wasted real estate.

Why is artist not a filterable column now? Seems like a completely unnecessary change.

 

I really want to share it but I'm afraid the dictators will patch it out 😞
I'm already going through the assembly code with a debugger (for educational purposes) to understand how the switch works.

I like the layout but I do not like that I can not filter my playlist by Artist. I also don't like that I can't just skim through all of the artists songs, now I have to click on each album. I have to know exactly where the song I'm looking for is located. These features were convenient and now they are removed. I just starting paying for Premium but I may cancel now and find something else since these convenience factors were removed.

This update has completely ruined my Spotify desktop experience. I'm not against the new design, but many features seem to have been outright removed and make it much more tedious and difficult to navigate.

 

  • Podcasts can no longer be sorted from old to new.
  • The sorting method for each playlist is not remembered.
  • If I'm in a playlist and click to an album, then page back, my position in the playlist is no longer remembered.
  • When filtering a playlist, after clicking a song from the filtered list and then clearing the search bar, the UI no longer jumps to the song's location in the playlist and instead jumps to the top.
  • Filtering by artist now takes additional clicks instead of the option of having its own column.

All in all, I find it extremely frustrating to use this update on Desktop. I'm strongly considering switching my subscription to another music client until Spotify can at least return to the usability of previous versions.

 

Hi,

Two issues i've found with the new UI are:

1. You can't sort a playlist by Artist. The only options I have are Title, Album, Date Added and Length.

2. You can't adjust the size (width) of the 3 parts of the menu (Playlist section on the left side, the middle part. and the Social part on the right).

 

Hope to see it get fixed because sorting a playlist by Artist is a really Basic feature and I'll have to move to another streaming service if it wouldn't.

Just found out you can sort by artist by clicking "Title" 3 times which is very un-intuative.

Please, please bring back the Previous and Next buttons! I truly do not understand the thought process in removing these from the player. 

 

Update: I'm just realizing this is only affected when I'm listening to a Podcast, please fix this!

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