In a perfect world, everyone falls asleep while listening to good music playing in the background, which then fades with the intensity of sleep. It is after all, what mothers do when they sing lullabies to their loved ones and you would expect that Spotify, the music streaming service, would have long figured this out and included the “fading music” option as part of their original offering to service users. The feature wasn’t included for an inordinate amount of time, despite insistent requests from users of the streaming service
Recently, however, Spotify has slowly rolled out a sleep timer for Android in the “Now Playing” menu that stops music playback after a set amount of time. While the service does not automatically sync to users sleep patterns (our earthly technology is not that advanced), it allows users to stop playback after a set period has elapsed. Neither does the music fade away as dreams take over, it rather just stops. Not bad. Not bad.
How to Use the Sleep Timer on Spotify
Using Spotify’s Sleep timer is both easy and intuitive. This is how you do it:
- Update Spotify to the latest available update on Play Store.
- Go to the Now Playing screen and tap the Overflow menu.
- At the very bottom, you will see the Sleep Timer option.
- Pressing the Sleep Timer will reveal several timer options that you can use.
These timers range from 5 minutes to an hour. This means that you can set Spotify to quietly go to sleep for up to one hour after the music has started playing. There is also the option to stop the music from playing just after a single track ends. To turn off the timer, simply repeat the above steps and press “Turn timer off”.
For most Spotify users, the new feature seems to work just fine at least based on some of the reviews that we have seen on Reddit, but there are some users who have reported that the performance of the feature is sporadic at best like this one:
“Only works sporadically for me. Android Q Beta 3. Can’t count on it turning off. Sometimes after the allotted time setting reverts to ‘End of track’ but still doesn’t stop playing music. I’ve only tested this through my Echo speaker; headphones or phone speaker not practical. Anyone else?”
Perhaps the reason for this odd behavior from Spotify’s new sleep timer feature is because it is still at a trial stage and there is not much user feedback on the feature which Spotify would rely on to make a better product. We can reasonably expect that Spotify has an internal testing environment and thus, perhaps a bug in the latest Android release is the reason why some users are experiencing issues with the sleep timer. Maybe, in the near future when all the bugs in Android Q have been identified, and removed, the feature will perform as expected.
Spotify’s Recent Design Changes
While seeking to take advantage of the sleep timer on Spotify, be advised that Spotify’s design interface has changed most recently in February 2019 and may be a little bit confusing. The design changes reorganized the mobile app’s button layout by pushing “Repeat” and “Go to queue” into a submenu and by making sharing a priority. Prior to these design changes, both of these buttons were easily accessible in the “Now playing” menu, but to get to these buttons, users have to click the three-dot menu in the upper-right hand corner. It is not clear whether Spotify users can use the sleep timer on repeat mode i.e. to repeat the same track for a set period of time.
What Users Are Saying about Spotify’s Recent Design Changes
While the sleep timer addition was welcomed by most of Spotify Android users, the new design changes seemed to irk many. Some even wondered “Why on earth Spotify would move the repeat button and hide it behind a menu.” It is hard to speculate why, but Spotify monitors what users are doing, and it could be that a majority of people don’t use the repeat button that often, which for an app looking to create an interface that serves the needs of the typical user, responds by bringing to the front-making more accessible – the most used buttons. Spotify also listens to user requests and that is how it came about the sleep timer in the first place.
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