German localisation: What does "Nächster aus" mean???

[Alias-thejester]

Can anybody explain to me what the words "Nächster aus" are supposed to mean? They appear in the playing queue on my smartphone app just below the title that is currently playing. I *think* it means "next up" but I can only guess because I just cannot parse those two words into anything meaningful (what they mean in isolation is something like "next one off").

Reminds me of MS Outlook which appears to have machine-translated lots of the UI Labels, so that "Reply-to" gets turned into "Antworten aus", which means "Answers off" ...

Mistranslating UI labels in a Language that Must be a major market is extremely unprofessional if you ask me. Not meaning to be rude, just letting off steam as I am confronted with a cryptic UI for a service that I am supposed to be paying for as long as I live.

[Jacob]

Hey @Alias-thejester, welcome to the Spotify Community!

Yes, I believe "Nächster aus" is supposed to mean next up. If you have a better translation for that I can try my best to pass it on the Spotify staff and see what they can do 🙂

[Alias-thejester]

Thanks! I just realised that sometimes there's actually "Als nächstes" just below the currently playing song, i.e. titles that are queued already, i.e. "Next up" is translated as "Als nächstes". And in that case "Nächster aus" is the third category of things in the queue. But sometimes it's the second category.

Is that a shortcut list to fill the queue? What does it do? I can't tell what it does because the label doesn't mean anything, and I can't tell what the label should be because I don't know what it does ...

I find the queue thing very confusing. I typically want to queue Albums, but sometimes individual songs, and I want to be able to choose where in the queue a song I am adding goes (next to be played / after all songs already in the queue / somewhere in the middle). If Spotify can do that, the UI definitely is not at all intuitive to use.

And now I'm going to read help pages. But please change the German translation of "Nächster aus" into something that's self-explanatory in German.

[Jacob]

@Alias-thejester,

What platform (Mac, Windows, iOS, Android) are you using? Each one is a little different but if I know where to look I can help you.

[Alias-thejester]

Android - sorry, thought it was obvious from the forum, but I just realised that the forum title is nowhere to be seen from within the thread. The version is 5.1.

[Jacob]

@Alias-thejester,

Oh yeah, I just noticed which forum I'm in, didn't see it earlier, oops...

Android is the only platform I don't actually have Spotify on, but I can hopefully still help. I'll use my iPod as an example because as it's the closest to what you're seeing.

Okay, so I opened up my play queue in English and took a screenshot of it:

Do those titles make more sense as to what they do?

If you want to understand more about how to use them, Spotify has a guide on Play Queue which you can find here: https://support.spotify.com/using_spotify/search_play/play-queue/

Please let me know if you need any more help!

[Alias-thejester]

Thanks! Now at least I know that it means "Next from". But I still don't know what that does... even from that help page (which mentions only "Next up", not "Next from").

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Make-entire-play-queue-editable/idi-p/4929 mentions two kinds of queue, asking them both to be changeable. Then there's a comment from Spotify from 16 December, a week ago, saying it's been implemented.

Still I'm none the wiser ... Can you explain what "Next from" does?

Ah, and the forum is visible somewhere at the top, but it's probably a good idea to double-check the system.

[Jacob · Accepted solution]

@Alias-thejester,

"Next from" shows the songs that are automatically going to play from the playlist or album you are listening to. When you press "shuffle," it can randomize this order without randomizing your "Next up" list! But you can also manually re-order it by dragging the right side of the song (with the three little bars) if you'd like 🙂

So basically, when you start playing an album or playlist, it automatically fills the "Next from" list for you, and then the "Next up" list is used when you queue songs (like in the article I linked).

Is that helpful?

[Alias-thejester]

Hmmm... not sure I am following. I actually get the help page that you linked to in German, I guess you are referring to the English-language version? Have to look that up later.

So you are saying that "Next up" is for songs/albums I add to the queue using the corresponding ... menu entry, while "next from" contains the songs that are playing from an album that I started playing as a whole. Correct?

If so, what's the use? Why would I want to start an album, then add songs in the middle while it is playing, thereby interrupting the album, then listen to the songs I queue by menu entry, then go back to the album I had interrupted earlier? If that is what it does?

[Jacob]

@Alias-thejester,

The page I linked changes language depending on where you are when you open it, so it makes sense that we see slightly different things 🙂

Yes, that is exactly how it works. I usually don't use it when listening to an album, but what I do sometimes is start playing a playlist, and then I decide I want to listen to some specific song, but instead of skipping around to play it I can just put it in my "Next up" list using "...", and then after that song plays Spotify continues playing my playlist.

[Alias-thejester]

Thanks. Now I understand what it does. I am not able to offer a better German translation because thar would require getting across the conceptual idea of the two sections of the queue, which would require a whole bunch of interconnected changes to the queue labels, menu entries and possibly other places.

Since I think the whole concept is wacky and useless, and since it's more than changing one localisation entry, I am not going to attempt that.

I am closing with the remark that this wacky queuing concept is the second nail in the coffin of my Spotify subscription after the equally wacky shuffle button that insists popping up everywhere. The third nail is the fact that the queue cannot actually be edited on an iPad in the same way as it can on Android - on the iPad I can only skip to the next song, on Android I can edit queues. I use both to control my Raumfeld, why they have different features is beyond me.

[Alias-thejester]

Hi again - just checked the EN localisation of the help page you linked to, and that doesn't seem to mention the "Next from" section either. The bad news is that I had forgotten your explanation of the two queuing things so I was again baffled today by how to listen to two albums in sequence; the good news is that I figured it out with the help of another forum post and another helpful community member; the bad news (this time for spotify) is that I still fail to subscribe to the logic of this concept, and hence will not subscribe to the service. Have I mentioned that?

The final good news is that I got a "Two solutions!" badge for marking my own post as a solution (the first one was to someone else's post). Makes me wonder how they allocate credit at spotify HQ ...

[Jacob]

@Alias-thejester,

I'm very sorry to hear that you feel this way about Spotify 😞 If there's anything I or the Spotify staff can do for you in the time being, please let me know.

Enjoy the holidays 🙂