The Spotify desktop client has seen a massive regression since 2008 or 2009. It's incredible how they managed to make it so unresponsive. Scrolling in a playlist is like playing a game at 10 fps. It's uncomfortable and not worth it. Ads are worse as well. I've seen countless malware ads in the bottom banner.
Add to that the massive start-up time for the Windows client. A fresh instance Spotify from a rebooted machine takes ages to gain full functionality. If you quit in the middle of a good playlist, most of the time you'll be able to continue playing from where that playlist left off. If you opened Spotify to find a song or move to another playlist, you'll be waiting a while.
I just started Spotify with a stopwatch:
2:26 for the main Browse to completely render
2:42 for the live search window to give suggestions
2:52 (+10 seconds) for the search to return a result
I once thought it was because of the massive local library that had to be loaded and sorted into Spotify, but I've done away with local files to try to speed up the start up. The results on my laptop are not any better. Maybe it's because I've been updating the same client since 2012?
Should a music player be anywhere near as heavy as Chrome? A web browser is a pretty immensely complicated thing (CSS, DOM rendering, Javascript JIT compiler, etc.).
Similar criticisms have been made of iTunes over the years (though I find it's not bad in the current version). Things like laggy scrolling are a bit understandable there, since they've defaulted to the grid of album covers view for a while. But Spotify looks like it's all just columns of text and a few thumbnails on the side?
Considering that a good many "music player" are basically written atop browser rendering engines... they're equivalent in some ways. Plus, they have the added overhead of checking tens of thousands of files for changes (if they do so on each start as some do).
I assume this thing is just a web app rendered in their "browser"? So doesn't it need to do all the things you list? Needs css to layout the DOM, needs to parse and execute javascript.
I'm a recent convert from grooveshark, so I've been using the spotlight web player and I find it a pretty nice web app to be honest. I haven't dealt with any of the actual desktop clients yet, so don't know if anything I said above is true.
> I assume this thing is just a web app rendered in their "browser"? So doesn't it need to do all the things you list? Needs css to layout the DOM, needs to parse and execute javascript.
From a users perspective, that is an implementation detail and doesn't matter. A users only cares if his music player feels slow or not.
It would take a bit more than using a hard disk rather than an SSD to create a 3 minute load time. It must be downloading the entire program over the internet every time.
Something is wrong there. I just tried the same tasks on my system; from clicking the shortcut to the Browse view rendering was 5 seconds, the live search displays suggestions almost as fast as I can type more characters, and the full results appear within a second. I am running it off an SSD, but that's not enough to account for all that time. I don't have a guess what it is, but something else is going on.
The recent removal of the system tray icon is anti-user. It provided users with easy access to Play/Pause from the system tray, but that meant users spent less time in the app, so the system tray icon was removed completely.
As for aero tiles... That's a Win8 thing? I guess it's a valid complaint. I think you can set global keyboard shortcuts for those actions, if that helps.
Aero is a vista+ thing. Hover over a playing vlc in the taskbar and you see skip/pause/play.
Foobar is classic to the cost of UX. We've figured out for a long time now bigger buttons are important, there's no need for separate pause/play especially if stop is right there.
It doesn't need a slew of crappy gradients and fancy shit, Just drag the interface forward a decade that's all. Usable with a touch screen should be a minimum now.
Ah, thank you. ncmpcpp looks great (and I imagine I can connect it to an mpd instance running on a separate computer), but it's really important for me to not have a window in my alt+tab list.
I'll try XMMS, I have tried it before but it never "clicked". I'll give it another shot, thanks!
You see, I was a very avid fan of winamp(2) about 10 years ago. Nothing else came close. Then onto linux, xmms did the trick (as all I needed was a winamp2 replacement). Then as my collection grew, my priorities change, I was after speed. So mpd was thing. In the past few years I haven't had a personal collection, now it's more often listening to music on grooveshark/youtube. After grooveshark went down, I got spotify (paid subscription), and I find myself being _stunned_ how bad, how slow, how ugly, how anti-UX it is. I think I may go back to having the collection on my HDD once again with mpd as that is still really fast. But that'll be difficult, as I'm often on the go and want to listen to stuff on my cell phone (where spotify is okay actually).
I have exactly the same experience as you. My solution is Google Music, where I basically just upload all my own music and I can listen to it on my phone. It's a bit of a hassle to keep the two synced, but not as much hassle it is to be listening to music in a browser window that takes up loads of RAM, as if playing an mp3 is some intractable problem.
It's 2015 and I can't "alt-tab" into spotify in order to pause/play by pressing space; I have to click somewhere in the upper half of the interface in order to "refocus", or the spacebar just scrolls down. Which is useful for something, I guess.
Though this is on Ubuntu, and Spotify is still a beta app on that platform last I checked. I don't think I've had this problem on Windows.
Check out the Arch Linux wiki on this. Spotify apparently plays nicely with the rest of your desktop and you should be able to set up media key short cuts.
I made a script that plays/pauses Spotify through dbus, which I usually execute by opening dmenu. :)
My keyboard has media keys, but I thought I would prefer short textual commands to having to move my hand to the upper right of my keyboard (and probably miss the key if I wasn't looking?).
Yeah media keys are annoying and not present on lots of keyboards. You could map this script via your window manager to something like special-F5 through to special-F8 to back-play/pause-stop-forward...
In Ubuntu Unity, you can just click on the sound icon in the top right corner of the screen and click pause. Or you can use the pause button on your keyboard, if you have one.
As someone who switches often between the mac and windows version this kills me. The mac version will continue after closing but the pc version just cuts the music completely.
This is simply a fundamental difference between OS X and Windows. Typically in OS X an application remains open after closing its last window, whereas in Windows this is typically the signal to quit the application entirely. Try minimizing in Windows, that's the appropriate equivalent.
The Windows experience is the same if the window is from an application that is running in the systray. In that case clicking the X closes the last window but leaves the application running.
I think daheza was saying that the removal of the systray caused the same actions (closing a window) to no longer do the same thing (get this window out of my way, but keep playing music) across operating systems when they used to in the past.
In Windows you used to be able to set the close action to minimize to tray (so effectively it did the same as OSX). This isn't a non-standard thing in Windows either, plenty of applications offer that behaviour. But a recent update of Spotify removed this and it is insanely annoying. I keep closing it just out of muscle memory and it's infuriating.
Hmm - I haven't really noticed any unresponsive-ness but I also am a paid subscriber, I wonder if the ads are responsible for the slowness?
The spotify mobile app has some odd behavior from time to time. The UI will continue to respond to my actions but nothing actually happens for 20 seconds, during that time i'll click on several different songs attempting to get them to play.
Finally, for whatever reason, the app springs back to life an begins to execute the actions out of some sort of queue leading to several songs playing. It seemed very odd to queue song plays in such manner. I would've assumed it would be last one wins rather than
"Song 1" - play for 2 seconds
"Song 2" - Play for 2 seconds
"Song 3" - play for 2 seconds
I may have clicked "Play song 2" 15 seconds ago before the song is actually played.
Overall, I love spotify though. I use it everywhere.
Spotify and SoundCloud are testaments to how users will endure whatever awful UX you give them as long as they're getting enough value from your thing.
The soundcloud mobile app is not that bad, at least on Android. It has the best audio scrubbing of any app I've used. The UI is super simple and made to work at a distance, e.g. while mounted in a card holder.
I absolutely hate the soundcloud app compared to the spotify app. Constant crashing, locks my phone up, random pauses during playback. Android, Samsung Galaxy S4. The UI is fine I just wish it didn't break every other song.
Speaking of the mobile app, the lockscreen UI on Android is absolutely infuriating while driving... The "Skip Song" and "Close" buttons are right next to each other and far too small. Between that and the features they've been gutting from the desktop app I've gone back to Google Play Music now.
I've frequently been unable to pause or change the volume of the music for tens of seconds because the user interface stalled. Completely inexcusable for an app that is ostensibly for playing music.
On the good side, since all the webviews are right there in the app as renamed zip files, I suppose they could easily be edited to cut out some of the bottlenecks?
Back in Windows 98 days, it took a few seconds to load a screen of a native app sometimes. Now our computers are orders of magnitude faster, and webapps can still take a few seconds to load a screen. Progress?
The thing that hadn't changed is humans - it was and it's still acceptable for an application to take a second or another to load.
Technical details had changed, but I can't really judge if those changes were drastically innovative or we're just redoing the same shit over and over, and can't tell if world has gone better or worse. I guess such judgements are highly subjective.
I can't say I've experienced any of the complaints about slowness that the other people have mentioned but this regression has really annoyed me. You could search for a song within a playlist and now you can't. I have no idea why they would remove it.
When the industry props you up as the only avenue for access to a large collection of streaming music, you don't have to compete on terms of stability, usability or features anymore.
They did a refresh recently (just a few weeks ago) that installed a new renderer both for the playlist content view and for the playlist list view.
That resulted in a big performance boost, at least on my Core i7 MacBook Pro. With older machines I can guess that the performance might still not be that good.
However, this refresh also removed the ability to filter the playlist content view (cmd+F). The worst part of losing that feature is trying to find stuff in "Local Files". Very awkward.
the mobile app has several modes in which it'll stop playback, and you need to pull it out of your pocket, and hit buttons or re-select your damn playlist before it starts your music again. also really simple shit like 'random or 'repeat' are impossible to find.
which is pretty much a giant fucking failure for a mobile app that's used by people in the car, bluetooth, people on the go, etc.
i wish i could say mobile itunes stayed useable, but it didn't either. we're basically choosing from the worst of the best, these days.
