New Desktop Experience - your feedback wanted!

[Hubo]

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.

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.

[eboddington]

For me I’ve seen the duplicate song notification when adding to a playlist sometimes, but not always, it’s inconsistent. It seems like this might be a bug? I (and clearly many others) rely on this feature and would like it back

[wocalax19]

I think if you took a second to read the 90 pages here you would realize they did not do good and you are not in the majority. I'm surprised anyone can come away with that opinion. Either way, even so, how are you OK with being forced into a beta?

[FabienT]

Hi,

Not sure if I'm supposed to post it in the Help section or not, I decided to post it here because I don't know if it's only for this "beta" version or for everyone.

Not sure if everyone has access to this new version thought, or if it's still for some of us only.

Anyways, already posted my feedback in here but today I'm here for a problem that I have since few days now :

When I follow an artist from his page, it's added to my Library as it's supposed to be. But, the artist isn't followed on my other Spotify apps (other desktop and on mobile).
Moreover, when if I restart Spotify the artist isn't followed anymore and he's missing in my Library.

Does anyone have the same problem ?

Thanks

[unknowny]

I'm frankly tired repeating the same request everywhere possible again and again, but can't resist to add up to the whole frustration which is this update.

You keep ignoring the column width in playlists. Make it adjustable! It used to be so many years ago...

[lostSoul4music]

I also want this toggle to old album view. Now I see list of albums not knowing where the song is have to go click all albums so I'll just give up sooner. Also discovering new music and songs is so frustrating from the same reason ... So bring back OLD album view!

[Rchy]

Trying to play Rogan full screen on Mac but there's no option to do this. Please fix! A tiny square in the corner of the screen pales to watching his show on YouTube.

[caquisse]

On my side, the new UI makes local files totally unusable:

- The track order for albums is no more respected, so now I've soundtracks with multiple CDs mixed up together with no sense at all. Tracks for a given album are randomly sorted instead of following the track/disc order like before

- Local files are hidden in some dark place of the app instead of being easily visible

- Total number of tracks/Total track length is no longer shown for the local files. This is pretty useful since the Spotify team keeps breaking the feature, so having the local count of files helps me to see if Spotify broke the desktop app again (and again and again) or not

So overall, it may be prettier than before but for now I don't care at all because it's ridden with bugs regarding local files and I can't use Spotify anymore right now because of that. If there's any way to opt out or revert to an older version which works properly I would like to know

[mlidbo]

---

@caquisse wrote:

On my side, the new UI makes local files totally unusable:

... it's ridden with bugs regarding local files and I can't use Spotify anymore right now because of that.

---

Wonderful 😕

Local files that sync to mobile is the last advantage keeping me with Spotify instead of switching to Tidal. And now that is broken. AGAIN! If this POS New-Experience is ever installed on my computer I'm gone. And it will take a miracle for me to ever even consider trying Spotify again given the way they treat their paying customers.

[omwro]

Has anyone noticed that spotify is just removing features that were working before? uhm idk, where is the "create similar playlist" option when you want to discover songs from the genre the playlist was made for?

[caquisse]

LOL! I was about to reply to a comment which helped me but it got deleted! What's the point of asking feedbacks if you apply censorship of users who aren't happy with the change?! I'm so going to test alternatives and cancel my Spotify subscription as soon as I find the streaming provider that works the way I want! Anyway, here is my original reply to the guy who helped me:

Thanks a lot @wocalax19 for the tip! It worked: I installed the provided version, and as a bonus I used the tips in this article to disable auto update from Spotify => https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Stopping-Auto-update/td-p/4785101
Now I can use my local files again, album tracks are ordered properly! However, that's so sad to see the Spotify team is breaking essential features and rolling them to production without any simple means of rolling back. I think I'll test some other streaming providers and switch to the one who gets this part right since Spotify does not care at all about this now 😕

[taemkv]

I really like new UI experience, but why when I follow the artist on artist page and then reopen the app, app says that I'm not following them. 

[thepaulharmon]

Fullscreen mode please! The visuals on modern TVs with Spotify Connect are great. Make it like that on desktop, eh?

[wuavo]

So after a month of using this terrible, new UI, I was surprised to see that Spotify rolled the old, far superior UI back for me for a few (blissful) days. This happened on Monday. However, as of a few minutes ago, the app stopped working, and once I restarted I'm now back to the new UI again. So it's 100% clear that Spotify has the power to revert the UI for users on a whim, and they’re actively ignoring our complaints and forcing users into the new beta UI. 

I know this will come off as a bit of a conspiracy, but the timing of this is very suspicious because my subscription auto renewal happens to be today. I wonder if Spotify is testing to see if they can keep disgruntled customers on just long enough by reverting the UI back for a few days right before they are due to auto renew, and then switching it back again as soon as their subscription is paid. Either way, I swear Spotify is just messing with us at this point. If this happened to anyone else, I'd be interested to know. My comment will be removed if I curse out Spotify, but that’s really my mood right now. 

[bballjoe77]

Please change it back to how it was, after using this version since the start it's simply gotten worse and worse. If you're all dead set on using the new UI, please don't remove features that were there and good for everyone.

1. I am no longer getting the check for adding duplicate songs to a playlist. This was extremely helpful so I didn't accidentally add a song twice to the same playlist. This feature still works on mobile.

2. The "Recently Played" tab under "Home" does not show what I've recently played on the desktop app or my iPhone, but rather just shows the stuff I've played on the web player. This is EXTREMELY annoying as I hardly use the web player and it's filled with links my friends sent me that auto opened in my browser from months ago making this whole tab useless when it used to be extremely useful. (NOTE: This was a bug before the UI update, but not for more than a year.)

3. Resolution/Monitor Scaling. It looks awful on a 1440p monitor. Album artwork and playlist covers on the home page is too small. Even with zooming in and zooming out the font size gets messed up and everything does not look right. Something isn't right as on a 1080p monitor things feel fine and it looks even worse on a 4k monitor.

4. No search bar. This one is egregious. Please add a search bar back to the top of the app or just somewhere where it's accessible to type in from anywhere on the page.

5. Somehow the most minor one I'm listing but still a big problem for me, I really do not like the new UI. It's not awful, but the old one was far superior. Copying the inferior web UI onto the desktop app was something no one wanted or asked for. Anyone doing that would have been using the Web Player.

I really love Spotify and have been on Premium for 7 years. Please listen to your community and make the changes that we're really all asking for. I hardly post feedback like this but these changes are so off-putting and out of place and it's frustrating that it seems like we aren't being listened to. 

Thank you

[gafman1]

Hi,

I can no longer drag albums to folders I've created under playlist, when I do the folders are greyed out (see pic). Is this a 'feature' or bug? I contact support who said it was a bug but it's not been corrected despite other bugs being fixed?  It's a major step to making spotify less user friendly.

I use this to 'bookmark' my recent albums as the spotify recent list isn't fit for purpose, being un-editable.  

[crawdad0]

Hi. I have a few things that I don't like with the new interface that I wanted to report. Maybe I'm using incorrectly, or maybe I just use differently due to large number of playlists with large numbers of songs. I'm a big fan and want to help improve the product -- please consider this helpful criticism. I'm on the Mac desktop version 1.1.48.625.g1c87c7f7-a.

1. First, the most annoying thing is that I cannot drag a song from the bottom of a playlist to any point higher in the playlist other than what's on the the screen at any time. I.e., selecting a song and dragging it up only goes as far as the screen, which is about 10 songs now with the album art shown for every song. Previously, dragging up would scroll the entire playlist until I got where I wanted. Now, if I had a song to a playlist with 500 songs already, but I want it to me near the top, I have to select and drag it up 10 songs at a time, over and over, till I get where I want.

2. I make lots of playlists, and one feature I like is that Spotify will ask if I really want to add a song to a playlist if it's already on the playlist. Apparently, this feature is not quite working correctly because Spotify let me add several duplicates of songs without the warnings, although I did notice that the warning did happen correctly sometimes. This happened enough to where I know it's a problem, and it's not user error. However, I was not able to discern the cause or a pattern.

3. I like being able to sort playlists by artists with 1 click on a column heading. However, the new interface doesn't have a heading for artist -- maybe because of the album artwork? I suggest just calling the column "Title / Artist" and allow sorting on both Title and Artist.

4. I know some people like the album artwork, but it doesn't do much for me. I would prefer seeing more songs on the screen at once. Please consider making this a "view" option to show album artwork or not on playlists.

5. Not related to new interface, but I would still like to be able to have playlists of more than 10,000 songs -- or at least for liked songs. I believe this limit is why I can't "like" any more songs on Spotify. Maybe the limit could be increased on request? I'd really like it to be more like 50,000.

Thanks.

Steve

[pasinsiri]

I cannot remove songs from my Made For You...

I searched in the forum and somebody said that I am currently a part of  I should leave my feedback here. It started from Spotify kept playing songs in a genre that I have never played before (and I will NEVER EVER listen to because I do not like it) and then Spotify generated a playlist with a list of songs full of such genre in my Made For You. I tried to remove that playlist, or at least songs in that, and tried to get rid of songs in the genre that I don't want to listen to from my account, but I can't.

I am wondering why I cannot personalized my Made For You playlists which are "Made For Me" right? I understand that you have recommendation systems that recommends songs to me (and I appreciated it) but I am confused that how on earth such playlists can be named "Made For You" if you cannot customize it.

[Melissaaakilic]

thanks for brıngıng back ''go to the song radıo'' optıon

[Hubo]

Hey @pepseg,

Thanks for your post here. Your feedback reaches the right folks loud and clear. You should be able to see the artist's biography on the bottom of the artist page. Also, you should be able to hide/like songs in Made for You playlists: 

Let me know if you can find these features!

Have a good one,

Hubo

[rha101]

Bring back the "duplicate track" feature when adding songs to a playlist. It went away for adding either one song at a time or multiple songs at a time. This makes it harder for a user to use the playlist feature. This was a perfectly fine feature *that already existed* in the previous desktop app. Making playlists in the mobile app is clunky so not a viable alternative.