i might be wrong
Since I like to listen to music, I’ve tried many music players. And since like to nitpick everything I thought I would share my “valuable” insights about the UI/UX on some of them. Don’t take this as objective truths or an academically correct critique, just an opion of a rando with a neocities page with a bachelor’s in comp. sci.
Spotify
This is the music player I’ve used possibly the most. It passes ok in most aspects in terms of UI and if you get past directly supporting AI drones and the mediocre artist royalties and revenue sharing system, it is still a usable streaming service. Except for the queue.
The Spotify Queing system
If you listen to albums, you’re basically a second rate citizen to spotify. If you press play on an album, you get the album in the queue. Simple right? But wait, say you also want to listen to the album that came out after it right away, so you find it, right click it and press add to queue from the context menu. You sit down and first song finishes, but instead of The Bends, the second song off of the first album, you’re hearing Airbag, the first song of the second album! You might think you’ve misclicked by accident, but no, this is the intended behaviour. You’ve just created a second queue, right between the current song and the rest of the album. And from now on, everything you “Add to queue”, will be added to this inserted second queue. If you actually don’t want to use this “pseudo-stack” queue, you have to drag and drop the album to the back of queue to create a correct queue. This is also impossible on mobile. You won’t actually have this problem, if you just mindlesslly consume playlist like spotify inteds you to do, since the playlist becomes the normal expected queue and queuing works fine after that point.
The positive thing about this is that the playlist feature of spotify is second to none, with easy collaboration, customization and even folders.
Tidal
I tried this on a whim to broaden my horizons as a spotify only user by trying other streaming services, after researching for a bit, I signed up for the 2(?) month Tidal trial. And holy fuck, Tidal is a dumpster fire. A disclaimer is in place, since my experience may be outdated, having tried it almost a year ago, but I expect not much has changed.
The music quality was fine, I haven’t really noticed a difference, even on my SHP9500 or 7hz Salnotes zeros. A big issue is the selection of content, which was severly limited. I had trouble finding some albums and some more obscure artists were missing entirely. This is probably caused by the horrible world of music licensing, so not really the fault of Tidal, but it still does severly impact the listening experience.
Offline mode
Since I don’t have mobile internet/data, I need to rely on an offline mode for most of my listening on the go (which is where I do most of it anyway). Excited by the prospect of an offline mode on Tidal, I downloaded some albums. Oops, I accidentaly started downloading the deluxe edition with 40 tracks instead of the normal one, let me cancel this. I tried to cancel it by clicking the download button, but you have to cancel it by clicking the kebab menu and then an option for deleting presents itself. After having donwloaded some albums, I went offline and tried to play them. Then I realized, that Tidal detects that you’re not connected, but you still have to go to settings to enable offline mode manually. Then, if you reconnect and want to listen back online, you have manually go back to the main settings and disable offline mode. Spotify has switched automatically since I’ve started using it in 2016 and Tidal can’t figure it out now? And one last thing, how hard is it to sync newly liked songs from when you’re offline to your liked songs when you go online? Apparently it is impossible, since Tidal just doesn’t let you like songs while you’re offline, much less sync them. To top it all off, once a song is played it disappears from history and is nowhere to be found, there’s no history of played songs while you’re offline.
Artists
When I followed some of my favourite artists on tidal, I got some weird notifications for new albums i didn’t recognize. I didn’t think much of it, but then I clicked play on Nirvana’s artist page and after about 20 songs, I heard some electronic tracks. Then I investigated and found that Tidal just puts all the songs from artists named “Nirvana” on one page. Even though they’re different musicians and are not related by anything other than name, they get put together. I thought this sort of thing would be resolved on day one, but apparently not. And since you can get multiple releases of an album on Tidal, this comes back in the form of tidal recomending the same song you’ve already added to your likes.
The whole thing just feels so polished in some aspects, but totally lacking in others. The Tidal curated playlist were so much better than anything on spotify and were relevant, not just top 50 in your country or some ai generated slop meant to keep you listening while you sleep, but playlists put together by real music lovers, for music lovers. It has real potential ruined by glaring issues.
Bandcamp
For advertising the music on demand so much, you would have thought they would polish it a bit more. The app feels like a demo, you can technically play albums you bought, but you’re so much better off downloading the songs in your browser and bring them elsewhere. On that front, why isn’t there an option to download the files off the app, in the app? It only lets you download them to keep them sandboxed in the app. Possibly some android restrictions? Still sucks, I uninstalled the app since it doesn’t offer anything new compared to downloading the songs from the web browser.
Blackplayer
If you want to listen to your music files offline, it is still imo one of the best options. Sadly the dev didn’t update for a few years and new android versions (13+) brought some issues with reading the files, so your library may not actually appear. Still worth the $1 I paid for it, but I’m not so sure about new price.
Symfonium
What is worth the price however, is Symfonium. The UI customization is stellar, although I do miss some options from Blackplayer. The queue handling in both of them is granular - you can add to the back or front of the queue (play next). There’s a timer that calculates time remaining to the end of the queue and when that is in relation to the current time, you can remove duplicates from playlist. Not to mention you can even play songs from multiple self hosted sources.
I took longer than expected for me to think about posting again, but I finally remembered. Things got a bit shaky at my job, but I finally got a car of my own, so I might do post on that. Other than that, thank you for reading and getting this page to 20k visits! If you disagree with anything I wrote today, leave a message in the guestbook.