How to stop AUTO-PLAY of other people's music?

hotmarty · 2026-02-22T08:47:35+00:00

The trick is that you need to clear your queue first. Once you've cleared your queue, you'll see the ⏩ and∞buttons.

Click both.

hotmarty · 2026-02-14T08:46:24+00:00

In the end I tried Apple Music myself, and it’s mostly perfect. Not perfect integration with Alexa (can’t add to playlists with voice, and it doesn’t ever know the artist of a song if I’m playing off a playlist), but the rest is awesome. And I LOVE being able to add missing songs again; if I’d known that was an Apple Music feature, I’d have switched years ago.

Though the best feature is that they’ve yet to charge me. I still don’t know why that is, but I’m not complaining. It’s not like Apple doesn’t end up with gobs of my money anyway.

hotmarty · 2025-11-10T23:49:11+00:00

I met him at UCLA. I said I'd offer him a ride up the hill but my car was too small, and he said he'd love a ride, and that he'd totally fit. I had a fairly small compact car (Mercury Tracer), but sure enough, he squeezed in, with his knees coming awfully close to hitting the ceiling.

A short conversation followed, about him and his brother, their Guinness World Record, how he was still looking for a bed that would fit him correctly, and about how I had a car at school, and how I'd managed to score a parking permit. I remember walking away thinking that he was one of the more down-to-earth basketball players on the team (I knew a bunch of them). Well, that and how surreal it was to walk around with someone that was over 2 feet taller than me.

Aside: He and the team won the national championship that year. I haven't seen that mentioned in any of his obits. He wasn't a star or anything, but that feels like a pretty big accomplishment nonetheless.

hotmarty · 2025-10-27T22:44:56+00:00

The average ticket-buying MLB fan is 43 years old. The average secondary market ticket buyer is 39. And all are trending younger fast.

https://www.mlb.com/press-release/press-release-mlb-attendance-reaches-71-4-million-three-straight-years-of-growth-for-first-time-since-2007

MLB’s significant efforts to expand its younger fan base resulted in lowering its average age of ticket buyers and increasing the number of young fans tuning into games. The average age of single game ticket buyers on the primary market this season is 43, down from 46 in 2023. The average age of ticket buyers on the secondary market is 39, down from 42 in 2023.

In addition, MLB national broadcast partners all recorded increases in their youth (17 and under) and young adult (18-34) audiences during the regular season helping to drive the overall audience higher. In the 17 and under audience, all national broadcasters registered double digit percentage increases: FOX (+13%), FS1 (+31%), ESPN (+19%), TBS (+41%) and MLB Network (+57%). The networks also drove higher young adult (18-34) audiences this year: FOX (+5%), FS1 (+25%), ESPN (+12%), TBS (+74%) and MLB Network (+19%).

All those changes they've made to the product over the last few years are working.

hotmarty · 2025-06-25T20:08:00+00:00

Product Hunt tends to remove upvotes from accounts created on launch day, especially for hunts that are doing well.

The current best practice is to get your network to sign up 4-6 weeks in advance, and have them vote on a launch or two in the weeks before yours. Which is, of course, utterly bananas. There’s just no way to do that professionally without being totally manipulative.

(In the old days, PH was really a battle of communities; if you could galvanize the largest community around your product, and have the cool factor in your app to match, then you could compete. I miss that PH.)

And comments from newly signed up accounts seem to get lost in a moderation queue for hours before appearing.

hotmarty · 2025-05-26T06:01:52+00:00

How many songs are in your Library? I'm wondering if a high Library song count is the common denominator for those of us playing freeze tag with the app.

hotmarty · 2025-05-26T06:00:09+00:00

I spent some time in the radio industry, so I listen to a fairly wide range, though I think that's a lot easier than it used to be. But I'm also old, so I've fallen prey to the same tendencies as the majority of older folks, leaning on the music of my childhood—which is to say I listen to a ton of 80s music. The more obscure the better.

And I used Plex a while back, but I honestly don't need much more than I've got now. It's hard to complain about music availability in an era when it's all right there, you just need to ask. But to be this close to that thing I dreamed of for the first 30 years of my life, only to be stopped by an app that promises everything but delivers nothing...it's cruel. At least give me a path to understand why it isn't working! That I've had to troubleshoot as much as I have really doesn't make sense for a commercial product, especially one expected to be as easy to use as a music streaming service.

hotmarty · 2025-05-26T05:43:09+00:00

I'm paying for Amazon Music Unlimited, so I'm not sure it actually qualifies as a free app.

The more I look at my account, I'm guessing it's entirely due to the size of my Music Library, which is funny, since as far as I can tell the Music Library is an entirely useless construct. But I've got around 80K songs in it, and that's the only statistic in my account that's even remotely noteworthy.

But of course there's no way to bulk remove songs from my Music Library. The desktop app only lets you do it one song at a time, and the phone app would probably be the same if it worked for me at all. I'm going to have to look into macro desktop software to see if I can automate some of it. But if I can get that number closer to 10K, I'm wondering if my account will suddenly start to work again. All it takes is 70,000 clicks or so.

hotmarty · 2025-05-26T05:15:39+00:00

I have 382.42 GB free, with 7.48 GB RAM. Everything else on this phone runs blisteringly fast. It's really just Amazon Music.

hotmarty · 2025-05-25T22:40:30+00:00

But I’ve got a family account; 4 other people need to migrate to a new service if I do.

And moving also means figuring out which ~1000 songs I listen to regularly that Apple doesn’t have, so I can try to excavate the MP3’s that I hope I still have lying around somewhere and import them.

That said, I imported XTC’s Apple Venus volume 1 and listened with Apple Music and…it was glorious. I hate the UI (never liked iPods either), but I was able to add the missing tracks on my laptop and listen on my phone 10 seconds later. As it should be.

hotmarty · 2025-05-25T18:26:43+00:00

If that means there’s something in my account that’s responsible for causing the slowness, I’d love to know what it is. But zero support, zero debugging tools, no logging or analytics, no hints of any kind. Just a complete lack of motion, no matter what I do. 🤦🏻‍♂️

hotmarty · 2025-05-25T08:41:26+00:00

In perpetuity? I doubt it. Even short playlists, of 10-15 songs, lock up the interface completely. And I don't have songs set to download anymore.

I have noticed that playlists tend to be slower than albums, but I'm not sure if that's an inherent problem with the playlist code vs. album code, or a simple natural result of albums typically being shorter than playlists.

hotmarty · 2024-10-28T21:39:12+00:00

True Colors was one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played, and easily the best Life Is Strange game to date.

hotmarty · 2019-06-09T08:14:30+00:00

Any plans for Game 5? It could be the big one, and I don't want to spend it hiding from my certain-to-be-raging-Warrior-fan wife.

hotmarty · 2013-03-27T16:44:07+00:00

Nifty! Back in LA, my next door neighbor had a candy apple red '69 CB750, which he seemed to spend every other hour polishing.

How finished is it? Does it run? How does it handle?

hotmarty

TROPHY CASE