Playlists overriding Crossfade Settings

[canfail]

Was there a new "feature" rolled out that allows playlist creators to override the local crossfade settings? I'm noticing sporadic, platform independent (iOS, FireTV, Windows) playlists which include 5 or 10 second crossfades. 

[Hubo]

Hey @canfail! Thanks for your report!

Some playlists feature special cross-fading/mixing done by Spotify or artists. If you'd like to use your own cross-fade preferences, I recommend creating a new playlist and dragging all songs from the original playlist to your new playlist. That should help. Let me know if you have any questions.

Have a great day!

[jechin1]

That feature sounds useless if it is a playlist that has weekly updates. It becomes even more cumbersome if you have multiple playlists that now have to take up twice the amount of room in your library list.

[johnnyproton]

This is idiotic.  Don't give me a preference just to override it without even exposing that.

As an example, this playlist was created by Spotify themselves:

https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWX9ZIH7jslKG?si=SItYfgc-TsSZJfGLKi_z8A

"Crossfading" also refers to a person being stoned and drunk at the same time, which is appropriate in this case.

[canfail]

So what’s the point of the setting under preferences? Please add a setting to either use User Settings or Playlist settings for Crossfading. 

[xeode]

Just getting back into Spotify and noticed this happening.  This is sort of cool that you can forward individual tracks within a 'mix', but these are hardly 'mixes' the crossfading is not beat matched, key matched, using any EQ, samples or effects, and half of these seem to be skipping the first minute and a half of a song, not just a little bit?  Just seen one where the first 3 minutes are skipped!?  If I wanted to listen to a mix/session/live performance I would listen to an actual mix/session/live performance.  If I start playing a playlist of songs I like I don't need the first minute to be skipped out for me, I like the first minute, the first minute builds the song and some of these 'crossfade' points are skipping the entire build up?  None seem to set a fade out point, just setting the point at which it starts playing to be a minute into the song?

This 'feature' is the worst of both worlds, it's really bad mix wise (it's not a 'mix' at all and they almost entirely sound awful, some seem to get lucky and sound OK though, mostly those where they fade on parts with no beat) and if you just want to skip through a couple of songs you're starting them all from part way through?  A point that makes no sense unless it started from the end of the last song in the playlist?  If you want to shuffle too this also breaks how they've planned out the crossfades.  If you let a song end and roll into the next one without hitting the skip button then perhaps it's debatably beneficial, but if you're pressing forward/backwards through a playlist ('playlist' as in a list of songs to play, not a cue point/track marker within an actual continuous mix) why would I want to hear the first part missing when browsing through this way?  And as per always this new 'feature' is not optional and completely ignores the existing Crossfade ON/OFF perference your customers have decided on?

I thought my Spotify was broken for a good 10 minutes before the internet told me this was yet another 'feature' forced on Spotify customers.  The behaviour is initially inexplicable, there seems to be no clue on the playlist/screen that this is what's intended and someone (mostly Spotify themselves as far as I've managed to find so far) has taken the time to hard-wire the playlist to do this, overriding the decision of the person that's actually paying to hear the music?  If this was being played at a party it might be a bonus over a standard playlist to not have a period of slower build up every song, keep the energy etc, but the fact they're far from good 'mixes' in their own right and you've not given any choice over this (again Spotify?) is the issue.  I prefer to play actual 'session' mixes in these cases and this being forced to listen to a playlist in this way is jarring when you know and love the songs that are in the playlist (and hence why you played it).

And the standard Spotify answer, 'oh just don't use the standard playlists (which you're paying for us to make for you) and manually make your own'?  As has been said already this is messy, time consuming, and prevents you from keeping up to date as public playlists are updated.  You don't like we've changed the Coke recipie?  Well that's not a problem you can always make your own, here, let us sell you the ingreedients so you can make it yourself the way you like it.  Maybe one day this will develop to point you can create actual creative mixes/mashups using raw Spotify tracks (rather than continuous audio tracks) and we will see this becoming more of an actual artistic expression rather than annoying forced-fed gimmick.  At the moment it's just forcing people to listen to dodgy shunts of songs they like the whole of (or do without the main playlists/manually work round it by reproducing the lists of songs that you liked but from scratch).

Can you imagine if Netflix had a "10 awesome movies you must see" collection, but if you clicked on it it they would silently skip out all the bits they considered boring?  All the bits that set up the plot and builds the film is now just wasted filler and they're doing you a favour silently skipping out for you?  But they didn't mention this anywhere on the playlist, or player, indeed anywhere, you just had to search the internet for "Netflix player error, skipping parts of my films" only to find this was a 'feature' and you should be thanking them?

I prefer not to use crossfade and so I turned it off, but skipping the first 3 minutes out of songs is crossfade on steroids and the fact it does this when you're browsing through using the skip button too (rather than just when you're letting it play through) is super annoying on collections of songs I otherwise like and was hoping to enjoy in their entirety.

Please can I register a request for a second "Crossfade ON/OFF" switch for "Playlist Crossfade Override ON/OFF" so I can continue to use these 'collections of songs' as collections of songs, rather than a half baked mix/half baked playlist bodge.  This is a promissing feature but why does it have to override the preferences of the people paying to listen to the music they want?  This isn't a radio station that decides which bits of which songs you hear, blended in the way they want to blend them, why would you override the wishes of your customers and lock them in?

Thanks very much

[LukTor]

That's just a big steamy pile of bull fecies! I want to hear all songs to their completeness in a playlist regardless if it's my playlist or not. And by that just the labour of copying to an own playlist is just a bad workaround for it. Re-do and do RIGHT! *grrr*

[CTS_AE]

So this sounds like it's on a per-song basis?

If I add that song to my playlist are you saying it keeps the crossfade?

I know a couple posts up was hating on the feature but this playlist is great, it's like I'm listening to an actual DJ it's very well done.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX2W6AhhHuQN4?si=WDhBZFtkTmap3HVO9SV_1w

But now if I copy two songs back to back into my own playlist will they lose the cross fade?
I would love to be able to set some of my playlists to have crossfade and some not. 
Maybe you do need to be able to control if there's a 2 second crossfade on some songs in a playlist and 6 seconds for the same playlist but between two other songs.

I feel like if this is already a feature but it's hidden to us. It would be nice if it were exposed in playlist settings.

I know I can set crossfading at an account level, but I tend to not want global cross fading.

[xeode]

Maybe they will expose this so people can set their own crossfade points in playlists but at the moment it's only baked into some of their own playlists unfortunately.  If you copy and paste a song/series of songs into your own playlist it just takes that song rather than the fade in/fade out point from their special spotify mixed playlist thing.

I think this is a promissing feature don't get me wrong, but at the moment it's limited by just being (as far as I last heard anyway, haven't listened to many of these more recently) to just setting a custom fade out point on one song and a fade in song on the other.  This can sound fairly good if they've chosen songs with simmilar natural BPMs, keys, etc and even less 'train wreck' when they choose to fade over at a point where neither songs have beats that can clash/need to be beat matched.  I heard several mixes which were highly train wreck however and I would have preferred they played the tracks in their entirety.

My main beef was that this behaviour overrode my crossfade setting and that it wasn't clear why songs were randomly (seemingly) starting half way through and ending early and doing something I had turned off (crossfade).  I was annoyed and the app seemingly having a mind of its own and skiping bits of the song I was expecting/looking forward to and only after resorting to searching the internet for a solution did I find this was actually 'feature'.  Something I've gotten used to with Spotify too sadly, I've found myself searching the internet for random behaviours/feature omissions on several occasions only to find myself on these pages being told that 'oh that's a actually a feature and we don't care, you should do X, Y and Z to work round us if you don't like it'.

They should definately let people set their own fade in/fade out points on their personal playlists so they can do something simmilar.  Maybe in future there will be more options for changing key/pitch/bpm, punching in and out, EQ, sampling, effects; proper DJ things other than fading from one song to another at an arbitrary point in each track.  Then this feature will be more flexible and impresive sounding 'like an actual DJ mix'.  At the moment having this feature forced enabled renders these Spotify 'mixed playlists' unusable in my case, I would like the option of how the songs are faded, that's what the option in the settings is ostensibly for.

It's a good idea done badly in my oppinion, it's got promise though certainly. 

The alternative of setting cue points in a single continuous mix/session track so you can generally skip around a mix to the point at which the next song fully drops is the best from the listening perspective but using the actual stock songs in this hyrbid way is good for artits' payments, song stats, rights management, ability to skip whole songs if you want to.  The key though is the flexibility, giving people the option of how they want the app to work for them rather than have it do seemingly random things by itself without clearly communicating what it's doing and why.