Comment by amethyst
5 years ago
At this point, I'd be willing to pay for a Spotify client that works exactly the same, but just ignores the existence of podcasts entirely. I use a dedicated podcast client when I want to listen to podcasts, and they keep shoving them in my face and taking up precious UI real estate everywhere.
But any client without support for Spotify Connect might as well be dead to me. Controlling my wifi speakers from my phone, or playing music on my desktop Mac from my laptop or gaming PC is critical functionality at this point.
Check out spicetify cli[0]! It patches the Spotify (desktop) client and makes it better. It also adds support for extensions, one of which[1] disables the podcast features. I haven't used the extension so I'm not sure how well it works.
Heads up though, the original developer is MIA at the moment and the latest few versions of the client are incompatible. There's an effort by someone to fix the issues and there are other maintainers who mostly just seem to address PRs. Personally I just downgraded the client and it works perfectly.
[0] https://github.com/khanhas/spicetify-cli
[1] https://github.com/3raxton/spicetify-custom-apps-and-extensi...
I'd be willing to pay for a Spotify client that allows you to select your audio output device. And yet here we are, 10 years later...
Spotify is a marketing platform first and an audio player second.
If you’re on Windows, you can define audio input and output devices on a per app basis through Windows’ settings. Handy for any app that doesn’t support such configuration (though Spotify obviously should.)
It works similar on Linux with pipewire/alsa/pulse, there are several guis for such.
TIL, thanks!
I'd rather use https://staticz.com/soundcontrol/ (which I do use actually) than rely on an app like Spotify to be honest.
This. I absolutely hate it when apps try to be smart and use their own audio routing.
I'm a Linux user and have multiple audio outputs. I've configured Spotify to always go to my amp / speakers. And it works great.
But then there's Teams, which is absolute sh*tshow. It always says "custom configuration" but you never know where it goes, and partially ignores the configuration in PulseAudio / PipeWire.
I understand why they do this, random users may find it more useful to have this choice directly in front of them, and I would agree... if it worked well! Zoom at least has the good taste to have an entry for "use system settings", which seems to mostly work.
I think that aside from "specialty" applications (like DAWs, etc) regular apps have no business messing around with the system audio settings.
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What platform do you mean? The iOS app lets me select output device. It’s a little icon next to play/pause, kind of half computer screen half bookshelf speaker (monitor/monitor :)
I think I remember seeing this on desktop too but at that point why not use the OS sound mixer?
No, the app lets you select what system you're going to listen to Spotify on, not what audio device to use on your system.
Sometimes I just want music through my speakers while I have something else piping into my headset. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Android works pretty much the same way. I'm usually listening on my PC, but I don't try to control other devices from there so I can't remember if it's possible there.
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Can't you just do that outside of Spotify? It would be nicer if you could in app, but with pavucontrol I have Spotify send music where it belongs.
They make it easy to play to any Bluetooth device or headphones. Covers my use case, but I can see it being annoying if it doesn’t support your setup.
On iphone I can’t seem to actually choose the bluetooth device to play to from the app itself. iOS limitation?
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Came here to say this. It was hard enough losing Rdio and now Spotify has been on a rapid decline for the last 1-2 years. It used to be a place to listen to music you already knew and maybe find something new and now they do nothing but shove podcasts down your throat. Who that works there is looking at the current UI as an improvement?
I loved Rdio for the Ui. I subscribed for years. That said Spotify has introduced me to so much music that I missed growing up.
The Spotify UI has been pretty painful lately but I have a hard time living because the suggested music selection has been so good.
I love my 3.5mm cables for this reason. No negotiating with vendors (except Apple but it's well known that they really suck) just plug and play.
I can't wait to sit my grandchildren on my knee and tell them stories of the magic headphones that you never needed to charge and just worked instantly with practically any audio device ever made by mankind right up until the iPhone 7 was unleashed unto the world.
They would probably see it like we computers that had memory which did not wipe when powered down. The inconvenience is minor and the benefits large. They will never deal with huge hell balls of cables/headphones. The charging is pretty painless and the airpods pretty much do just work instantly with any Apple device (they can detect which one you are using at the time).
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Between their screw ups and Pine64's successes that hopefully won't happen.
Remember to throw in stories about impedance matching and the differences of A/B and T/D class amplifiers, as well as soundstage, acoustic compression and active correction.
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I'm with you 100%. If they had a decent podcast experience, I'd be happy to switch but it's terrible. Why can't I mark something as already played?
Yep; I'm a paying customer of spotify and I like some of the podcasts they have. But they don't have the gap removal + speed controls of Overcast (my fav podcast program on my phone). So I'm in this weird situation of never wanting to listen to any podcasts through the spotify app, which I'm paying for. And then when I want to listen to music (eg while coding) I have to wade through podcasts which are intentionally designed to blend in with music recommendations in spotify's apps.
I hate it. If any spotify PMs are listening:
- If spotify wants me to listen to podcasts, let me do it from my existing podcast app. I'm sure the developer of Overcast (and other apps) would happily add a spotify login button for a song if you ask nicely and offered to pay.
- Let users disable podcasts entirely in the spotify app.
- In the spotify app, give podcasts a consistent visual differentiator so I can easily visually separate them from music. Nobody wants to be tricked into listening to a podcast instead of music. Maybe make the "album cover" for podcasts a rectangle instead of a square. Or change the background color for all podcast related content to blue so I can find podcasts visually (or filter them out visually) while scrolling.
I don’t think Spotify wants you to be able to use your favorite app.
Their strategy is to take the open protocol of podcasts and pay the hosts to turn that into centralized tracks on Spotify to force you as the user to use Spotify to listen to it.
It’s about control intentionally - that’s the strategy.
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Spotify has spent over half a billion dollars on acquisitions and investments into its podcasts division, there is zero chance they ever intentionally implement anything that might impede the returns on that spending.
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If you care about Podcasts, don't listen to them on Spotify, ever. Spotify's plan is to build a walled garden around them.
Spotify promotes podcasts and buys exclusives so desperately, because their plan is to grow their audience to a too-big-to-fail size, so they start dictating their own terms. Every remaining use of RSS is a business opportunity.
You can. There's a "Mark as played" button in at least the Android Spotify app that I'm looking at right now.
Can't comment on anything else, though.
It’s insane that Spotify on Mac doesn’t support airplay.
When my girlfriend and I moved in together, we got rid of her Alexa devices because privacy and use HomePods. But Spotify doesn’t work with AirPlay for reasons I cannot fathom, so I set her up with a program that will AirPlay specific applications on her Mac.
That said, there are open source libraries and clients for AirPlay so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get them supported. I have a Raspberry Pi for streaming to “dumb” speakers.
Airfoil [1] is worth every penny. The same could be said for pretty much everything Rogue Amoeba makes.
It’s also worth noting that Spotify can act as a remote for its own service across devices. So you can start a song playing on your phone and direct the output over AirPlay and then just interface with that session using the desktop client.
[1] https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/
If I understood your problem correctly, you need to listen to Spotify through your HomePod which is on the same local network as your Mac.
This is what I do on macOS. I press on the little megaphone icon (enable it in OS sound preferences) in menu bar and then I can choose my HomePod from the list, without any third party software. I am running Big Sur but in two previous versions I also did the same. Maybe I’m missing something here but I think it should work seamlessly.
That routes all the audio from the mac though, not only Spotify. And with a noticeable delay.
This makes watching a "GIF" with audio (say browsing Reddit), opening a video, answering a slack call, etc. a very bad experience.
Spotify by itself supports its own protocol, whatever that may be, and chromecast. The iOS app should also support Airplay through the OS.
Personally I have a Spotify enabled receiver plugged to my audio system, it works really well.
I don’t understand, not a user of Airplay - your Mac doesn’t have a way to stream to airplay devices? Why does it come down to the app?
The Mac can use the Airplay device as an output device, but it's not ideal, because that will send ALL sound to the Airplay device.
The correct solution is for the application to support Airplay, so that for instance Spotify can stream music to your Airplay device, while the Mac sounds still goes to the speakers of the laptop/iMac.
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I gave up on Spotify because of this - and because of their hostile moves to turn podcasts into another centralized service.
Apple Music is still mostly worse without discovery, but at least lossless makes up the quality difference that use to be there.
Got me thinking. I wonder how much scope there is to build apps for platforms like Spotify which are built around a given use case.
For example - for people that prefer listening to albums. Or people that only care about political podcasts. Or something. I wonder if the global audience is enough to support indie products like this.
Significant platform risk though.
i don't like this podcast stuff either. even just the homepage that displays artists (that i will never listen to) is enough to annoy me. i would really love an option to open directly into my playlists or something else. im building up a local music collection at the moment so its not going to be annoying me for too long more