A couple of days ago, we shared with you a new design for Spotify’s library that seems to be in very limited testing. The interface, which mixes music with podcasts and offers both list and grid layouts, has four filters on top for your playlists, artists, albums, and podcasts. But it turns out there’s a fifth one that only shows up when you set some music to download for offline use, and honestly, I think this is my favorite feature of the redesign.
The Downloaded bubble appears at the rightmost side of the top library filters. When selected, it lets you browse all your offline content, including albums, singles, playlists, and podcast episodes. It can also be sorted by recently played or added, or alphabetically or by creator. And just like all the other filters, a grid view is also available besides the regular list.
New Spotify library UI with ‘Downloaded’ filter.
What sets this apart from the old design is the grid view for those who prefer a more visual layout, and that aforementioned ability to see everything in one list. In the old design, you had to tap the Filter button next to the search bar and check the Downloads filter, but it only applied on the current tab. So if you wanted to see all your offline content, you had to do this for albums, then again for playlists, then for podcasts. To go back to seeing your entire library content, you had to uncheck that filter on each tab separately, too. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t a streamlined experience.
Old ‘Downloads’ filter was a bit hidden and only worked per tab, not across the full library.
The new design still takes into consideration filtering by playlists, albums, or podcasts; but it does it with a neat animation and in a smarter way. You can select one of those bubbles first, then combine that with Downloaded, which flies off from the right side, to only see the offline content you care about.
Browsing ‘Downloaded’ as a whole, or filtering by playlists or artists first.
Sadly, as the GIF above shows, Spotify mobile continues to treat playlist folders as second-class citizens. When I use the Downloaded filter, the entire folder that contains an offline playlist(s) shows up in the list and tapping it reveals all its content, not just the offline playlists. In the GIF, my “💚 My Spotify” folder shows up and opening it reveals everything, even though I’ve only downloaded “Release Radar”.
Still, this is a step in the right direction for offline content management on Spotify. If you find yourself away from a connection and want to enjoy some tunes or podcasts, you don’t need to go digging in every tab and enabling filter by filter to see what you can listen to. You simply tap the main filter and that’s it. I like this a lot more.
This new library design appears to be in limited testing — so far, I’m the only Android Police team member who has it. It’s live for me on v8.6.2.774 of the app, on both of my Pixel 4 XL and Pixel 5, so it seems to be enabled server-side by account, not by device. If you don’t have it yet, don’t worry; you’re not alone.
