Now Playing panel abnormal behavior

[Ender-Wang]

Describe the bug
I am using Spotify, and I have always set "On Media Change" to "When Manually Changing Media", which I assume it means when changing via keyboard skip keys, control center or Now Playing popup buttons. But recently I noticed that the Now Playing panel shows up by itself while playing a Spotify playlist, I was just doing my work, definitely not changing media manually.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:
Play Spotify and just let it keep playing songs

Expected behavior
Now Playing panel shouldn't show up when not manually changing media.

Screenshots

Event control mode: BetterDisplay.

Please complete the following information:

• OS: Sonoma 14.5
• Device: MacBook Pro M3 Max 14"
• Version: 3.3.0 build 269
• Spotify version: Spotify for macOS (Apple Silicon) 1.2.37.701.ge66eb7bc

Additional context
Not sure whether it's related to recent update of Spotify or something changed in macOS 14.5. Btw, sometimes it shows up, sometimes it does not (which is the expected behavior). It seems random to me. Besides, I am connecting to an external display pretty much all the time.

[Wouter01]

Thank you for the bug report. As the setting describes, the problem might be related to your crossfade settings, have you checked those? To give a bit of insight in how the feature works: the app currently does not know if a media change is performed by the user or the system, so if this feature is enabled, it will decide to show the HUD based on the progress of the song. The app will show the HUD if the song is changed, but is completed for less than 95%. In hindsight, it might be better to change this to a fixed amount of secs (e.g. 5) instead of a percentage.

Now, as for your problem, it can be caused by two issues (I think):

• Spotify crossfade will report the song has changed too soon, making MediaMate think the user has initiated the song change
• Spotify does not report the song progress position correctly. I have seen this issue a lot with Apple Music, but not with Spotify. If the issue happens a lot, you could check if the song "progress bar" correctly works in the Now Playing HUD. If it stays empty, this means that Spotify is not correctly reporting the song progress, and the feature might not work correctly

[Ender-Wang]

I checked the crossfade settings in Spotify, it's off. I never use that feature. Besides, I did see the correct song process on MediaMate popup.
Thanks for the insights into how the feature works. Percentage base seems to be the problem. There's a huge difference between a 2hr-long podcast and a 3-minute song. Maybe change it to time-based, like a fixed 2 or 3 seconds? (5 seconds sounds too long, for reference, I have set the auto-hide time of NowPlaying to 1.25 seconds, which matches the auto-hide time of vol and brightness animation).
Or maybe Spotify is not reporting the song ending time correctly or consistently in recent updates, since I never seen this kinda of behavior before, while on the same version of MediaMate.

[Wouter01]

I will definately change the behavior to be seconds-based instead of percentage based. Once an update is out with this behavior, I will report back to you!