Playlist Folders Rendered Worthless Thanks to Flat DOWNLOADED Section

[Afront]

I've waited so long for playlist folders on Android, and now that they're finally here I unfortunately seem to have a fundamental problem with them. Here's an example to show what I mean.

Say I want to listen to my playlist called Jer's Party Playlist. I know I keep it in a folder called My Party Playlists Folder. I have a lot of playlists and tend to download lots of them. So, to find my party playlist here's what I'm presented with:

DOWNLOADED
----------------------------
Playlist 1
Playlist 2
Playlist 3
Playlist 4
Playlist 5
Playlist 6
Playlist 7
Playlist 8
Playlist 9
Playlist 10
Playlist 11
Playlist 12
Playlist 13
Playlist 14
Playlist 15
Playlist 16
Playlist 17
Playlist 18
Playlist 19
Playlist 20
Playlist 21
Playlist 22
Playlist 23
Playlist 24
Playlist 25
Playlist 26
Playlist 27
Playlist 28
Playlist 29
Playlist 30
Playlist 31
Playlist 32
Playlist 33
Playlist 34
Playlist 35
Playlist 36
Playlist 37
Playlist 38
Playlist 39
Playlist 40
Playlist 41
Playlist 42
Playlist 43
Playlist 44
Playlist 45
Playlist 46
Playlist 47
Playlist 48
Playlist 49
Playlist 50
Playlist 51
Playlist 52
Playlist 53
Playlist 54
Playlist 55
Playlist 56
Playlist 57
Playlist 58
Playlist 59
Playlist 60
Playlist 61
Playlist 62
Playlist 63
Playlist 64
Playlist 65
Playlist 66
Playlist 67
Playlist 68
Playlist 69
Playlist 70
Playlist 71
Playlist 72
Playlist 73
Playlist 74
Playlist 75
Playlist 76
Playlist 77
Playlist 78
Playlist 79
Playlist 80
Playlist 81
Playlist 82
Playlist 83
Playlist 84
Playlist 85
Playlist 86
Playlist 87
Playlist 88
Playlist 89
Playlist 90
Playlist 91
Playlist 92
Playlist 93
Playlist 94
Playlist 95
Playlist 96
Playlist 97
Playlist 98
Playlist 99
Playlist 100
Playlist 101
Playlist 102
Playlist 103
Playlist 104
Playlist 105
Playlist 106
Playlist 107
Playlist 108
Playlist 109
Playlist 110
Playlist 111
Playlist 112
Playlist 113
Playlist 114
Playlist 115
Playlist 116
Playlist 117
Playlist 118
Playlist 119
Playlist 120
Playlist 121
Playlist 122
Playlist 123
Playlist 124
Playlist 125
Playlist 126
Playlist 127
Playlist 128
Playlist 129
Playlist 130
Jer's Party Playlist <- here it is, but I'd probably scroll right past it
Playlist 132
Playlist 133
Playlist 134
Playlist 135
Playlist 136
Playlist 137
Playlist 138
Playlist 139
Playlist 140
Playlist 141
Playlist 142
Playlist 143
Playlist 144
Playlist 145
Playlist 146
Playlist 147
Playlist 148
Playlist 149
Playlist 150
Playlist 151
Playlist 152
Playlist 153
Playlist 154
Playlist 155
Playlist 156
Playlist 157
Playlist 158
Playlist 159

ALL
----------------------------
Starred
Carefully Designed Folder 1
Carefully Designed Folder 2
My Party Playlists Folder <- it's in here!

Carefully Designed Folder 4

Playlist 155
Playlist 156
Playlist 157
Playlist 158
Playlist 159

In other words, playlist folders are supposed to help me organize and locate my playlists easily, but when I'm forced to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll through a big flat list of downloaded playlists, folders become almost worthless.

The simple solution is to not artifically split and duplicate playlists like this, since the green downloaded arrow icon already indicates that a playlist is downloaded. But Spotify specifically designed the split into the app - can someone explain to me why?

[SteveBrammer]

The best solution would be for the Downloaded section to be an expandable/collapsible list so that it only takes up one row at the top level, then you can choose to expand it and display all the playlists that are downloaded.

[licenced]

Or for there to be two views, similar to how the play store shows you Installed vs All apps, which you can swipe between

[Afront]

There are many ways to fix this, I'm just wondering why it was implemented like this in the first place. Am I missing something? It survived throughout the preview so the devs obviously thought it was a good feature worth keeping. My suspicion is that they only tested it with a few playlists and didn't fully appreciate how much it would fail to scale.

[GilesDH]

Hello all, First spotidy post 🙂

I was gutted about this aswell. I immediatly (stupidly) reordered all those bulky playlists that were previously so necessary to keep things in order into lovely folders (took a long time) only to open my spotify app to find all the playlists were lined up at the top just as you described.

What I'm doing as a temporary (I hope) fix, is that I've created one huge root folder called ALL and dropped every folder into that. Because I download all my playlists everything in that folder is ready to play anyway.

Now I occasionally have to scroll way down to the bottom to get to this folder but generally I just don't ever navigate out of it.

This has an added advantage that I can use the ALL folder to replace the lost 'library' functionality so I can suffle play all.

What I would like adding though is to be able to long press a folder and download all it's contents instead of each playlist inside that folder. Another day perhaps.

Giles

[JonasNorstrom]

Apart from the excellent suggestions above about making the downloade section expandable or split downloaded and all playlists in different views, I would really like to have folders also in the downloaded section.

Since I mostly listen to downloaded playlists on my phone, I have quite many downloaded playlists, and to have the folders visible also for downloaded folders would make the app more user friendly in my opinion.

[gvoima]

I concur, the downloaded section is utterly useless. The green ball basicly tells the whole story.

[Arxx]

I hope Spotify doesen't forget this issue. It bothers me every time I use Spotify on my Android. (Every day...)

Spotify: Either remove the "downloaded" section, or at least put it on the bottom.

Please

[neo-x]

To me it works perfectly. I just put playlist folders inside folders. If I would have loads of "same named" playlists, I'd keep them as foldered - Part 1-10 and Part 10-20 and if there are custom named lists, I'd keep them in a separate playlist folder.

Surely it could be cool to have a 1-10-20-30-40-50 or such way to scroll the max 10 playlists down and show every single playlist and jump to next 10 or such. or possibility to spcify what "page / section" the desired playlist could be.

my 2 cents.

[Arxx]

neo-x

But you still get all the playlists showed "flat" in the "downloaded" area above your playlist folders. 

On my phone it looks like this (just multiply the content by ten at least)

Downloaded:

Album 1
Album 2
Album 3
Album 4
Album 5
Album 6
Album 7
Album 8
Album 9
Album 10
Album 11
Album 12
Album 13
Album 14
Album 15
Album 16
Album 17
Album 18
Album 19
Album 20

Playlist Folders

Artist 1

• Album 1
• Album 2
• Album 3
• Album 4
• Album 5
• Album 6

Artist 2

• Album 7
• Album 8
• Album 9
• Album 10
• Album 11

Artist 3

• Album 12
• Album 13
• Album 14
• Album 15
• Album 16
• Album 17

Artist 4

• Album 18
• Album 19
• Album 20

Kind a pain in the a** to scroll trought a looooong list of "Downloaded" before I get to the same playlists, just organized as I like

[David]

I believe that it looks like this because it's generally expected for certain playlists to be synced, rather than entire folders. However, I agree that in these cases it could be a little more elegant. I'll see if there is an idea for this in the Ideas section.

[djheadshot]

I agree this is one major flaw with spotify android app as it makes all the playlist organization pointless in offline mode on android and when connected to the internet you have to scroll through all the download playlist to get to to your playlist folders as organized on the desktop app. Really hope they fix this soon.

[Joe]

There's an excellent idea here which, amazingly, has received almost no support 😞