How are you struggling to navigate with Spotify? I think the Spotify usability is great. But I have been using it since it first came out and so any "quirks" I'm possibly just used to. Still, I find it easy to use.
If you think Spotify is bad, have you tried Apple Music? Jesus, that is a stinking pile of shit. It's awful and exactly what stopped me from using it beyond two weeks into the trial.
Google Play Music is somewhere between the two but I find absolutely no problem with Spotify's UI/UX. That said, I never used Rdio so don't have that to compare it with.
I'm a former Rdio user who's migrated to Spotify. It's clearly better in some ways but I struggle with trying to understand some of the decisions the team has made.
Just off the top of my head...
- The queue is fundamentally broken and useless. They really should rename it to "play stack... kinda".
- Clicking on an album to play it puts you in a subtly different state than playing the first song in that album. I'll let you figure that one out.
- The activity stream is one-way. there is no way to reply to a post. You are just shouting out into the darkness.
- Gestures don't work on osx, you have to find and click the tiny back button to go back.
- It's track/playlist based but playlists have a 10k song limit, so there is no way to keep a large collection of 'favorite' albums.
- From a list view there is no way to tell if an item is a single or a full album without clicking into it's detail view.
- No way to change your avatar. It's tied to whatever your facebook avatar is.
- Playlists have no description or image - unless you are a music label partner.
And dozens of features and niceties that Rdio had that you probably can't appreciate until you used them.
There's a slack community (Rdio Lovers) with hundreds of people that can't find a service that is anywhere near as polished and complete as Rdio was.
The spotify queue system is just awful. Various examples:
- I can't just put music in the queue to play and then stop with an empty queue. There always has to be something in "next tracks", either an album or a playlist.
- I can't add a playlist to the queue.
- The queue is not synced between all my devices (spotify desktop on osx, spotify beta on linux, play.spotify.com, android app, mopidy-spotify for home stereo). With Rdio there was just one queue and everything played it. Spotify Connect is trying to fix this but it's not supported everywhere yet.
- Sometimes things I've deleted from my queue magically reappear.
- Restarting the app (on osx) makes me lose the first song from my queue (since it jumps back to "next tracks").
oh geez you just reminded me of a huge wtf on the mobile app. Whenever you get to an album or playlist, the gigantic green button says "Shuffle Play" and there is no way to change that.
Why is the default play button "shuffle" when I do not have shuffle turned on?
Yes! The first time I used the mobile app I literally spent five minutes trying to figure out how to play an album in the correct order, until I eventually realized I could hit play on the first song. Definitely a huge wtf. Does anyone at Spotify actually listen to whole albums?
It's so maddening I'm considering switching to Google Music, but I'm not sure it's much better. Their mobile app has also really annoyed me in the past.
If you think Spotify is bad, have you tried Apple Music? Jesus, that is a stinking pile of shit. It's awful and exactly what stopped me from using it beyond two weeks into the trial.
Google Play Music is somewhere between the two but I find absolutely no problem with Spotify's UI/UX. That said, I never used Rdio so don't have that to compare it with.