I usually keep my opinions on software to myself, but I struggle to understand how the audio playback code path is not rock solid at this point.

It's a state machine. That's it.

It's not audio quality or the specific playback experience I had a problem with. It's all the features around it. I'm used to players like Winamp, foobar2000. Real native applications that are responsive and customizable and feature rich.

As some basic examples, the spotify app does not have a listening history, or at a minimum some counts and the most listened songs. Or the app on the samsung tv does not have any setting or information about the audio quality.