yet another post about Spotify

Music Sorry. But if this blog has been about anything over the years, it has been about my obsessions and I'm very obsessed at the moment, so here's yet another post about Spotify. Wanting to get the most from the application, I've been reading the blog. The whole blog. As well as being able to follow the development of the software from update to update (did you know you can link to tracks?) there's all kinds of information about getting the most from the software and in greater detail than the faq. Here are some of the things I've discovered:

Searching Spotify
Searching is mentioned in the faq, and there is a link to this post, but I'd somehow missed this. Essentially its searching the metadata of the original files, by year, genre, artist, words in title and what have you. If I have a criticism, it's that it's a bit unwieldly. 'year:2009' already yields over thirty-five thousand tracks all in no particular order. Perhaps an additional future feature would be search results rationalised to appear as they do on the artist pages in release date order. Also, the thorny problem of rubbish classical music support presents itself, since 'classical' doesn't have a genre tag of its own and is labelled with the date of recording, not the date of composition -- so no discovering the state of music in 1599.

Here be ads
Written when the software was still in closed beta, here's a post asking people if they actual want adverts: "We have started testing ads in Spotify for a group of interested beta testers. If you want to be a part of the test, please let us know and we’ll get you some ads." Um no. That said, it's the the suggestions of these people making the sacrifice which probably led to them being so unobtrusive. More on the process here.

How hard can music metadata be?
On the subject of metadata, here's an interesting discussion by a Spotify programmer (I think) of how well the various music sellers and players deal with an Aphex Twins track which seems designed to screw things up.

My Spotify tattoo
I wonder how she felt when they changed their corporate logo. Side discussion -- isn't the new one so much better?

Spotify scrobbles
It certainly does, though this post also has a link to a rather good Greasemonkey script. One of the criticisms of Spotify is that it doesn't have great suggestion power yet, certainly not as clever as Last.FM. What this does is add a small icon next to tracks and artists at Last.FM which once clicked searches Spotify for references which can then be played. I've already 'discovered' Jewel Kilcher soundalike Anna Nalick, since it was on my main recommendation page, though I'm yet not sure if that's a good thing. But really this is amazing and useful and amazingly useful and a good place to stop.