Greetings All,
I'm new to Spotify Premium but extremely experienced with other streaming services including Rhapsody (10 year user), Napster, Mog, Google Play Music, iTunes, etc, and I have used Spotify free for school and collaborations many times / had an account for years. The goal/idea I'm exploring is converting to using Spotify as my main media player because it is most compatible with all of my hardware and I like the way you can switch what device is listening freely. I'm also very experienced with media players including WinAmp, VLC, QuickTime, and so many others. Let alone all my music production tools - I'm an audio engineer. Point being I've used many a queue system in my day for personal use, work, and school, but I've never seen anything like this... There are 2 sections to it, "Queue" and "History". That's weird enough off the bat, but then the queue section has 2 parts, current song (always one song, obviously - the one that's playing now) and queued songs. When a song finishes, it goes into the end of the history and the next queued song plays. OK, I see that kind of makes sense, but why? It also makes perfectly fine sense for the list to remain stationary and the play icon just moves on down the line...
In fact, that makes a lot more sense because what if you want to navigate to another song you can't wait to hear then get back to the regular order you spent so much time setting up? Apparently in Spotify, everything between what was just on and what you want to hear gets deleted from the queue because you have somehow indicated it all isn't that important anymore. Pushing previous track plays the last played track, instead of the previous track in the previously established queue. Yeah, that back button is actually called "Previous Track" - it's a totally different concept than a browser back button, which is how it's being used here. Spotify has a back button for the UI browser, and I think that's awesome. Totally different thing, though, and when I'm moving forward and backward through my play queue I expect things to navigate the way I set them up. I don't know what the "Next Songs" are or how they got there at the very end of the queue, but they don't really bother me (though I haven't yet experimented much with looped playback and could see this causing weirdness). You can see in the history page screenshot how my listening got jumbled navigating through the album I was listening to, and songs had to be added back to the queue multiple times before I realized I am only supposed to listen to Spotify in the order I committed to before pushing play or suffer delays in whatever else I'm doing while trying to casually listen to albums...
Now let's play a random song we want to listen to one-off in the middle of our queue. The way the interface is set up, if I'm playing this song in album or artist view you'd expect it to just disregard the play queue and move through the album. That's how Rhapsody, Napster, and iTunes work. You know... the queue is one thing, playlists are another thing, and albums are another thing... (kind of like real life) Spotify's browser seems configured in a way that this would be majorly convenient. Instead, playing another song just sticks it between what you're listening to and what's next in the queue, and now navigating forward and back this song will be right where you listened to it in order. But, by definition, I did not specifically queue that. I just played it. So it makes no sense.
Wow... those playback buttons really are actually browser navigation buttons, and we are browsing whatever music crosses our perception and expected to maintain goldfish attention spans. This is not how music or art are meant to be appreciated - this is how advertising works.
Sorry, am I just spoiled from using tapes and CDs? Are these advanced user functionality concerns? It seems pretty basic with every other media player ever... I see a lot of people complaining about other weird queue features in discussions here from years past that mostly seem to have been corrected now, like not being able to rearrange tracks (which I can do just fine, so long as I don't accidentally click play on one down the line and delete all of my setup I was just working hard on - not lol). In this setup, when I look back at what I was getting into over a listening session all I see is a convoluted mess that kind of stresses me out and definitely can't be conveniently sorted into playlists or manageably favorited/followed. If I wanted to keep up with my play count or recently played history, I'd expect to do those things in their own containers just like in iTunes or anything else. If anything these features are advanced functionality, though, and the only programs that offer it offer it as a separate playlist page in the UI ("Recently Played" or "Play History") and a separate sorting field in the song browser ("Play Count"; "Times Skipped" is a nice field to see, too, but let's not get ahead of ourselves - I just want this to work normally first). The current setup is not how I like to use music, and it feels like it's just trying to be weird to be different. It also could be the result of extensive focus groups led by marketing departments seeking in part to enhance the user experience but much more so to encourage whatever behavior makes Spotify the most money. As an entrepreneur, I get it, but these are not good reasons to mess with your customers' standards. Please fix this...
Thanks,
-Xep
Staff / Moderator/ 3 years ago in Social & Random