Winter wonderland

[plonq]

I always add Current Music to my posts when I am setting up the tags and other post meta data. When I was setting up to post this yesterday, the song I Got You came up in rotation - a metal cover of it, that is. I like the cover, but I was in the mood for the Split Enz original, and I went looking for it in my playlist - where it wasn't.

I am sure I added the original version long before I added the metal remake, but for some reason it had vanished from my Spotify list. It is possible that I hadn't actually added the song, but this is not the first time I've discovered missing songs that I distinctly remember adding earlier. My suspicion is that the artist/label pulled the song and replaced it with a cleaner version. It's still a bit annoying.

Recent updates have also made the Spotify application a bit sluggish and unreliable. It's not completely broken, but it's disheartening when a company somehow manages to make their product worse with each "upgrade".

Overall I love this music streaming service, and I think it's worth the monthly subscription, but there are definitely things I miss about WinAmp - such as having Semagic be able to detect what I was listening to automatically so that I didn't have to manually type it in. Also, I miss some of the funky plug-ins you could add to WinAmp.

Just two months ahead of the official start of winter, we had our first significant dump of snow. Usually snowfalls this time of year are short-lived. The significant, damaging blizzard we got in early-mod October last year was mostly gone within a couple of days, but we are hovering so far below our normal seasonal temperatures this year that some of the snow we got yesterday has a pretty good chance of lasting until spring.

I mean, it's pretty, but the novelty is going to wear off after 3-4 months. Most of the trees are bare now, but there are a few that hang onto their greenery until the last, bitter second.


Some of the standing water has got a crust of ice over it now, but the river has not frozen over yet. It will.

Comments

[frith]

I've read rants by people who have had their cloud-stored rare music tracks replaced by Apple with a standard version. Perhaps Spotify is up to the same shenanigans.

At work I think they've switched to Window 10. The old Windows Media Player has been replaced by something else that doesn't seem able to play tracks on random, even though it says that option has been enabled.

No snow here. Yet. The forecast calls for snow next week. Meanwhile, we wear shorts.

[plonq]

I think that it is the artists who are responsible for the shenanigans I am seeing on Spotify. Tool is a good example. When I first signed up for the service, they had only 1-2 songs up there, and they were only songs that happened to appear on movie soundtrack albums.

Later, much of their catalogue showed up on the site, and I went through it adding a few dozen of my favourite tracks. Later, those tracks all disappeared, only to reappear again later on different albums.

I don't think there was anything nefarious in it - from what I've heard, the band is a real class act when it comes to their music online. I think they were genuinely mixing things up to ensure they had their best versions available.

[frith]

Ah. That clarification refreshed my understanding of Spotify. I've never used it, I'd forgotten who or what was uploading the tracks that play on Spotify. Thanks! ^_^