[madsushi]

The recent removal of the system tray icon is anti-user. It provided users with easy access to Play/Pause from the system tray, but that meant users spent less time in the app, so the system tray icon was removed completely.

[conradfr]

Infuriating. It's 2015 and my Winamp is still more usable than a "new" music player.

Why do they care if I spend more or less time in the app if I'm a premium user, surely that can't be the reason for this regression.

[DigitalSea]

It's 2015 and Winamp is still the only music player that really whips the llamas ass.

[mwcampbell]

foobar2000 is pretty lean and mean too, though also Windows only.

[mahouse]

But it doesn't whip the llama's ass.

[Already__Taken]

The ui is stuck in 2001 though and it still doesn't have the ability to play/pause/skip from the aero tile.

[morb]

For me, the no-BS standard looking UI was the reason to choose Foobar, as compared to Win Media Player or Winamp and other weird looking ones. (Remember Sonique? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_%28media_player%29)

As for aero tiles... That's a Win8 thing? I guess it's a valid complaint. I think you can set global keyboard shortcuts for those actions, if that helps.

[Already__Taken]

Aero is a vista+ thing. Hover over a playing vlc in the taskbar and you see skip/pause/play.

Foobar is classic to the cost of UX. We've figured out for a long time now bigger buttons are important, there's no need for separate pause/play especially if stop is right there.

It doesn't need a slew of crappy gradients and fancy shit, Just drag the interface forward a decade that's all. Usable with a touch screen should be a minimum now.

[seanp2k2]

Also, no other music player has the MMD3 skin. Best top-bar music player ever.

[sosuke]

That brought back some great memories thanks!

[StavrosK]

Winamp is just the best piece of software ever written, ever. I still lament the fact that it doesn't run properly on Linux.

[pen2l]

xmms, audacious, etc.

When I went from win -> nix so many years, all I wanted was a music player with the interface that of winamp2. xmms gave that and I was happy.

But then I discovered mpd+ncmpcpp. Really great if you have large music collections, have been using it since.

[StavrosK]

Ah, thank you. ncmpcpp looks great (and I imagine I can connect it to an mpd instance running on a separate computer), but it's really important for me to not have a window in my alt+tab list.

I'll try XMMS, I have tried it before but it never "clicked". I'll give it another shot, thanks!

[pen2l]

It's so weird for me to be talking like this.

You see, I was a very avid fan of winamp(2) about 10 years ago. Nothing else came close. Then onto linux, xmms did the trick (as all I needed was a winamp2 replacement). Then as my collection grew, my priorities change, I was after speed. So mpd was thing. In the past few years I haven't had a personal collection, now it's more often listening to music on grooveshark/youtube. After grooveshark went down, I got spotify (paid subscription), and I find myself being _stunned_ how bad, how slow, how ugly, how anti-UX it is. I think I may go back to having the collection on my HDD once again with mpd as that is still really fast. But that'll be difficult, as I'm often on the go and want to listen to stuff on my cell phone (where spotify is okay actually).

[StavrosK]

I have exactly the same experience as you. My solution is Google Music, where I basically just upload all my own music and I can listen to it on my phone. It's a bit of a hassle to keep the two synced, but not as much hassle it is to be listening to music in a browser window that takes up loads of RAM, as if playing an mp3 is some intractable problem.

[Dewie3]

It's 2015 and I can't "alt-tab" into spotify in order to pause/play by pressing space; I have to click somewhere in the upper half of the interface in order to "refocus", or the spacebar just scrolls down. Which is useful for something, I guess.

Though this is on Ubuntu, and Spotify is still a beta app on that platform last I checked. I don't think I've had this problem on Windows.

[_asummers]

This functionality works on OSX, so it must be limited to the Ubuntu app.

[thrownaway122]

Check out the Arch Linux wiki on this. Spotify apparently plays nicely with the rest of your desktop and you should be able to set up media key short cuts.

Or maybe just use the Clementine add on?

[Dewie3]

I made a script that plays/pauses Spotify through dbus, which I usually execute by opening dmenu. :)

My keyboard has media keys, but I thought I would prefer short textual commands to having to move my hand to the upper right of my keyboard (and probably miss the key if I wasn't looking?).

[thrownaway122]

Yeah media keys are annoying and not present on lots of keyboards. You could map this script via your window manager to something like special-F5 through to special-F8 to back-play/pause-stop-forward...

[Flimm]

In Ubuntu Unity, you can just click on the sound icon in the top right corner of the screen and click pause. Or you can use the pause button on your keyboard, if you have one.

[clemsen]

Alt-tabbing into Spotify and then pressing space does not pause the playback on my Windows 7 system either...

[daheza]

As someone who switches often between the mac and windows version this kills me. The mac version will continue after closing but the pc version just cuts the music completely.

[__float]

This is simply a fundamental difference between OS X and Windows. Typically in OS X an application remains open after closing its last window, whereas in Windows this is typically the signal to quit the application entirely. Try minimizing in Windows, that's the appropriate equivalent.

[pests]

That is not what he is saying.

The Windows experience is the same if the window is from an application that is running in the systray. In that case clicking the X closes the last window but leaves the application running.

I think daheza was saying that the removal of the systray caused the same actions (closing a window) to no longer do the same thing (get this window out of my way, but keep playing music) across operating systems when they used to in the past.

[hdougie]

In Windows you used to be able to set the close action to minimize to tray (so effectively it did the same as OSX). This isn't a non-standard thing in Windows either, plenty of applications offer that behaviour. But a recent update of Spotify removed this and it is insanely annoying. I keep closing it just out of muscle memory and it's infuriating.

[baliex]

This update also removed the Alt+F, X keyboard shortcut I was using to quit from the keyboard. Don't think it's possible to do that any more.