Spotify

[DAB]

One thing they need to fix, at least on the Mac client - not sure about others - is the ability to play though a searched list of tunes as if it were a playlist/album listing. Seems I can listen to a single song, or go listen to an album. Having to make a playlist before I'm sure I'm going to like something enough to bother making a playlist is irritating - so is manually playing each song.

Or am I missing something?

Right mouse click queue and then play everything that you've placed in the que. Works for me!

One of my favorite things with Spotify is that there are some really great smart playlist available. Example: Today's Top 40 Country each week when the list is updated, it automatically gets updated on my Mac Client and then updated on my iOS devices. Since I have the playlist on my iOS devices set to download, any news songs added to the playlist download without me having to do anything. If the song drops from the weekly top 40, then it is automatically deleted from that playlist. I don't know of any other service that offers this.

 

[jef]

Right mouse click queue and then play everything that you've placed in the que. Works for me!

I'd prefer to not have to add it and just play through the list that I already have right there in front of me from the search. But I suppose that works in a pinch. Thanks for pointing it out.

One of my favorite things with Spotify is that there are some really great smart playlist available.

The playlists features are pretty cool. A friend shared out a playlist and I started adding a bunch of punk/alternative songs to it to give him a schoolin' on the genre. Not sure he's ready for metal yet

 

[ibprtazpolpcp]

jef, if your Queue is empty and you search for something, all ya gotta do is click the Play button I think. Dunno how best to empty the queue, maybe save a playlist with one song and click play then fast forward. Bueller?

DAB, spotify doesn't have what iTunes calls smart playlists (= rule-based). They're cool though cuz they can be so huge.

In search try spotify:user:sonicmagazine
Subscribe to some of his Published Playlists
You can make a folder (Ctrl+Shift+N)
Drag some of the playlists into the folder
Play the folder on shuffle

Click on one of your subscribed playlists. Towards the upper right you can see who else subscribed. Click on them if you wanna see if maybe they created some cool playlists too. Etc...

 

[DAB]

DAB, spotify doesn't have what iTunes calls smart playlists (= rule-based). They're cool though cuz they can be so huge.

I am not sure how Topsy does these auto updating playlist, but each week when the new top 40 list comes out, my playlist get updated automatically.

I've just not had time enough since I've subscribed to figure out how this works, but I don't think it is like smart playlist, which just grabs out of your iTunes library based on the criteria you set. This works in that they can add and or remove songs and for all I know it maybe done manually by someone. I need to do some more reading on it.

 

[DAB]

iOS Spotify App updated to version 4.17.

Fixes: Crashing when creating playlist on the fly and bug that content would sometimes vanish from your iOS device.

This latest update does not address the power dock issues. This issue happens if you have your iOS device docked with power adapter. If you turn off the power the iOS Spotify app crashes. Only known work around for this is to use just the standard USB cable plugged in directly to the bottom of the iOS device and not use a dock. I tried this work around today and the app never crashed once.

I hope they address this soon, because I generally dock my iPod Touch or iPhone on my XM Skydock, so this is very inconvenient. I will try to be patient, but if the wait too long to address it I may cancel the sub and just use Slacker again until they do. Still holding out for a fix now though.

 

[DAB]

Update:

I have worked with Spotify's support, but I can tell you they aren't anything like Slacker support. Many think Slacker support is bad, but by comparison it is great.

I don't get any sense of this issue being important to them. They said they had no idea how many people actually played there device while docked, didn't see it as a huge deal, but would see what they could do. I of course said a bug that causes your app to crash when removed from a powered dock or if the power dock has power cut seems pretty urgent to me.

I have still not decided, but I am leaning towards canceling and then trying them again down the road.

Anyway, just updating everyone, it doesn't seem like very many people on DRC care much about Spotify anyway...

 

[jef]

Update:

I have worked with Spotify's support, but I can tell you they aren't anything like Slacker support. Many think Slacker support is bad, but by comparison it is great.

I don't get any sense of this issue being important to them. They said they had no idea how many people actually played there device while docked, didn't see it as a huge deal, but would see what they could do. I of course said a bug that causes your app to crash when removed from a powered dock or if the power dock has power cut seems pretty urgent to me.

I have still not decided, but I am leaning towards canceling and then trying them again down the road.

Anyway, just updating everyone, it doesn't seem like very many people on DRC care much about Spotify anyway...

I've been using it, but I'm not sold on paying for it yet. The interface does some weird things when you use it with local files. And they don't make it easy to file bug reports or even get an answer.

Oh, and edit to say that I think Spotify may not be getting a lot of talk because of the Invite thing. I wouldn't, and I know a lot of people that won't, sign up without a test drive of the service.

I've found at least once on the Mac app that Spotify will choose to play a local file rather than stream it. This is probably a good thing - saving some bandwidth, and whatnot. However, whatever they are using to detect that you have a local copy of the file needs work.
On at least one occasion I've had them substitute an album track with the same title, only from a live album. The dumb thing is that it didn't detect that I had the entire album locally - it found just this one track , and it wasn't even from the right album.

I've also found a lot of weird holes for what might be considered less nameworthy artists. They aren't unknown, and Spotify has some of their work available - just not all of it. I know that some of it is probably to blame on the labels, since some of these guys have had lots of little labels come and go out of business of the years.

We'll see - $10 isn't bad for what it is so far, but I'm not jumping in until I see things settle down a bit, and maybe see some of those holes filled.