Krita may have started out as a digital painting tool, but today it is also a pretty good picture editing tool, and certainly easier to use than GIMP for many common photo editing tasks.
It's still the only open source image program I know that will not only let me print, but also show where the image will be on the page, and let me move it and scale it up/down. Seems like overkill, but I keep it installed for that reason.
As a KDE developer, I think Gimp is pretty great and has made massive progress in the upcoming 3.0 release (also on things only Krita could do so far, like reasonable colorspace-independence, also UI-wise). Obviously we're very proud of the Krita team. I use both regularly for different tasks, and that they have slightly different objectives and mission statements has been great for open source content authoring.
> It keeps pushing playlists that feel generic, bland, more based on demographics than my years of consistent listening history.
I don't really agree with this point. The personal playlists (both Discover Weekly and the Daily Mix ones) are very close to what I usually listen to and have made me discover dozens of artists I didn't know before. Maybe they work better for some than for others, but they don't feel like being based just on demographics at all to me.
I feel like both of you are correct. It feels to me that Spotify's recommendations easily gets stuck in a 'local maxima' where it just keeps recommending the same music over again with little variation. I found much more variation from other music streaming services where the playlists are supposedly actually human curated. Music just ends up feeling a lot more bland with Spotify, in my experience.
I don't even know what the Discover Weekly playlist is supposed to be. It frequently puts in not-new songs from not-new artists Spotify know I've been listening to.
I've had the same exact experience. I had to stop relying on Spotify-generated playlists because they just kept giving me the same familiar songs over and over again.
The "local maxima" thing is interesting, because while with Spotify it is noticeable sometimes, it was a lot worse of a problem with Google Play Music which I previously used. By the time they shut that down, I almost felt trapped into listening to nothing but Tycho.
> I found much more variation from other music streaming services where the playlists are supposedly actually human curated.
Like which ones? I tried Tidal and music discovery sucks just as badly there too. I'm really craving a music discovery experience that brings back the humanity. Even when an algorithm suggests a good song, it still feels hollow and divorced from any cultural context.
I think Apple Music's playlists and algorithmic recommendations are much better and have more variation. Unfortuantely, Apple Music is terrible at playing music. OP can rightfully complain all they want about homepage customisation, but Apple Music, even on iOS, will just regularly refuse to play music files. Even worse with their embarrasing web or Windows clients.
Not sure if it's a different team building the feature or maybe it is because they are more constrained by the actual choices of the existing playlist, but the recommendations I get underneath a playlist that I am creating are MUCH better than the generic playlists for the same genre that get promoted on the homepage / search results.
Yeah I find these recommendations (which I think are the same ones that play after an album or whatever has finished) to be really good on the whole. There are some songs it keeps suggesting and after a while it can get a bit “stuck” on the same artists, but I’ve discovered so much good music through them. The main For You playlists aren’t much good for me. I thought it might be down to the stronger signal of “this is specifically what I want to listen to”
My main complaint with Spotify's recommendations algorithm is that you cannot provide any clear negative feedback to it anymore.
I played a single Christmas album from an artist that my mom wanted to hear over the holidays, but I don't like that artist or style of music otherwise.
Now, every time they release a new song it comes up in my release radar, and random similar things pollute my discover weekly.
There's no way to say "never recommend this to me" or to remove past listens from my history. I'm just forever doomed, apparently, to get jumpscared with Christian contemporary music anytime I try to play these playlists.
Yeah fair enough, I have had the occasional few months where it goes a little haywire (too skewed to a genre / style I was just curiously listening to, rather than wanting more of).
It does seem to fix itself - although a negative feedback mechanism would be nice!
I don’t agree with the author too. My Release Radar is totally on point with my type of genre, it has been this way. I’m curious if author has a generic taste in music?
I definitely don't have the budget for a Mk3 but I can see a number of original Launchpad Pros and Mk2s for sale on local websites for not much money. Count me in as another person interested!
They're not really comparable. GIMP is for picture editing, Krita is for painting.