Playlists

[leroybrock]

I've been trying out the Spotify Premium and decided to ask around here before abandoning it.

Is there anything in the works to sort out (what I perceive to be) the dogpile disaster that is playlists on Android?

It's just an awful dogpile that does not appear to want to be flexible, intuitive or convenient. The app does not appear to want to sort playlists by anything other than the order in which they were created. Albums cannot be added to playlists except by laboriously selecting and adding every individual track individually. There is no multi-select function for working with tracks and playlists. The recently added Radio feature seems to be run by some bat**bleep** insane system that repeats songs at inappropriate frequencies or plays stuff that i would not expect or want to hear.

Spotify has a nicely sized catalogue but when the irritations I've listed are stacked up against features such as Slacker's ability to ban a song or banish an artist completely or Rdio's better management of collections and playlistsmy enthusiasm wanes.

Are there any plans in the works to sort things out?

[personanongrata]

welcome to the spotify android community.  thanks for the feedback... please keep it coming.  we love hearing about our users' frustrations and then doing nothing about them besides thanking them for helping us make our product better.

here is what you need to know:

- we never update the app to fix bugs -- only to add new features (or remove them) which will introduce more bugs, and these updates only occur once or twice per year.

- we never communicate with users regarding when updates will be released and what they will contain -- we will tell you that numerous unnamed bugs will be fixed and app stability will be improved.

- we never publish changelists, so when an update is released, you will likely have no idea why.

- we go to great lenghts to ask you to provide formal bug reports and detailed descriptions of your exact problem that hundreds or thousands of other users also have -- this is to make you think we are prioritizing our work and trying to understand the countless bugs in our app.

- our app currently transmits hundreds of megabytes of rogue data per month over your mobile data connection -- so if you have data caps, you will need to look for another service.  no one knows why this happens, what the data is, or where it goes, but rest assured, this is in no way a privacy concern for you.

please enjoy your stay and remember that you are free to cancel any time.

[David]

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@leroybrock wrote:

Albums cannot be added to playlists except by laboriously selecting and adding every individual track individually. 

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You should be able to tap on the corner button and create a new playlist from the album menu.

[personanongrata]

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@David wrote:

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You should be able to tap on the corner button and create a new playlist from the album menu.

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you don't even understand what he's complaining about.  you can't add an album to an EXISTING playlist.

[David]

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@personanongrata wrote:

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@David wrote:

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You should be able to tap on the corner button and create a new playlist from the album menu.

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you don't even understand what he's complaining about.  you can't add an album to an EXISTING playlist.

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It seemed as if this feature wasn't mentioned at all, so I thought it best to say so. 

[leroybrock]

This is one of the things that I find unnecessarily difficult about Spotify.

[leroybrock]

To outline it a little better...

1. Everything is a playlist and playlists don't appear to be sorted or sortable by anything other than the time they were added.
2. There's a section for synced playlists and a section of all playlists meaning that everything that is synced is listed twice.
3. Since adding songs to a playlist individually can only be done one at a time it means that every time I add one to a list I have to scroll down through the giant dogpile of lists and search to find the list that's not sorted by Alphabet, Artist, Album or Playlist name and that I have to scroll through them for every single track.
4. You can't add an album to an already existing playlist for... some inconceivable reason. It'd rain frogs or something? Camels would eat prairie dogs and the moon would grow a beard?
5. The radio seems primitive and stupid. It can play the exact same track again after only two other songs have played? What the hell? And what it considers related artists to the one you create a station for can be really bizarre.

I've already decided to cut out paying until at least some of this is resolved.

[personanongrata]

just to add an fyi:

the ability to add an album to an EXISTING playlist did exist before the UI rewrite in april.  this is one of the several removed features.  we've been promised that these features would return, but hey, it's only been four months... keep paying and hang in there.

regarding the radio, yes it is a joke.  i've been playing with it for several days now, and as far as i can tell, thumbing a song down has no effect whatsoever other than that particular song will not be played again.  I've thumbed down more than 10 songs from certain artists, and still that artist plays...  nothing at all like pandora or other real radio services.  thumbing up a song seems to have no effect whatsoever other than adding it to your "liked from radio" playlist.  and there is zero documentation on how these things work (unlike, e.g., pandora, which explains its whole rating system).  there is no way to see what you have liked and disliked for a particular station, and no way to know if these preferences carry across stations (i've not listened to enough different but similar stations to determine this).  if you want real radio, stick to pandora.