I'm trying Spotify premium right now and have found many many operational issues after only one day. I like the concept of Spotify but the execution is absolutely horrible. I'm probably not going to continue with my subscription due to the many bugs and poor UI design. Here are the list of issues that I experienced today alone:
At the start of the day I was not a Spotify premium user -- just a "free" user. I had a few playlists that I was following, so I thought I'd just click "Available Offline" on the playlist so that it didn't eat up my data while on the road. I was waiting for something to happen, like a progress bar to appear showing the completion status of the playlist download, but nothing happened. I exited the Spotify app, re-opened my playlist, and the "Available Offline" option was toggled off. I turned it on again, and waited, and again nothing happened. After some research I discovered you have to be a Premium user to play songs offline.
Spotify should not have the "Available Offline" toggle enabled for "free" users if it requires them to have "Premium". The toggle should be greyed out. Spotify should also tell the user that the require Premium when they try to click on "Available Offline" if they have a "Free" account.
After realizing I needed a Premium account to play offline, I signed up for Premium by entering my credit card info into the App. Nothing happened after that. I tried "Available Offline" again on my playlists and nothing worked. I exited the app, closed the app from task manager, then opened the app again. The "Available Offline" was toggled back off. I closed and reopened Spotify about three or four more times and it did not fix the problem. I read on the forum that a "fix" is to sign out of the app then sign back in.
Spotify should automatically recognize that you've signed up for Premium and activate it without having to sign out and sign back in, or if this is required the App should at least tell the user to do this.
I signed out, and signed back in and I had the Premium options available to me. I clicked "Available Offline" on my first playlist I was following, and it downloaded completely without issue. I left for my road trip and all was well, until I got bored of that playlist and wanted to download another one. I went to McDonalds and used their free WiFi to download another playlist, but their WiFi was slow. The download made it to about 50% and I figured that was good enough and I continued on my road trip.
Some of the songs in the 2nd playlist would play for about 5 seconds then become inaudible, even though the song still appeared to be playing (i.e. the song progress bar was moving and the lapsed time was incrementing but there was no music actually being played. I tried probably 20 different songs in the playlist that had the green downloaded icon, and most of them would not even play at all. Sometimes they would play for like 10 seconds. If I move the scroll bar to the middle of the song, the song would restart from the beginnning, play for 5 seconds, then become inaudlble again (but the progress was still moving).
Going back to the first playlist, everything worked fine. Again going to the 2nd playlist, the App was exibiting the same behaviour as above. Most "downloaded" songs didn't work and if they did, it would only work for like 5 seconds.
Staff / Moderator/ 3 years ago in Social & Random