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> Spotify is a music streaming service. I don't understand this objection. Every time people say "software is slow today: compare Spotify to Winamp/Xmms", the

> Spotify is a music streaming service. I don't understand this objection. Every time people say "software is slow today: compare Spotify to Winamp/Xmms", the objectiion is that Spotify isn't Xmms, it's a music streaming service. But so what? Why can't a music streaming service be fast to start up? It's already a thick client. My life isn't going to end if I can start playing music within milliseconds but the playlist is a few tracks different compared to a hypothetical playlist that was hypothetically edited on another computer which doesn't exist because I use spotify exclusively on my phone. There is something about Spotify that means if I play a track for the first time it will have to wait a few seconds to start streaming. But what is it about Spotify that means that it takes several times longer to start playing the same track I was listening to just before it crashed compared to how long Winamp took? > I'm using the desktop app right now. It's using 160mb of ram and it's very responsive. This feels a little like it's meant to be irony, except that you clearly mean it seriously. You don't see anything wrong with a webservice client that has local caches using 160 MB ram? And you think that's not bloated, in comparison to a music player that ran on a machine which had 8 MB ram - even for the operating system? My experience with Spotify is that it's basically a loading symbol. I more or less switch between two playlists (Discover Weekly and Liked Songs, with occasional forreys into the albums of tracks I hear and like). Every time it gets kicked out of memory - which happens extremely fast on my phone with 8 GB ram - it takes ages to get back up to the point it was before. (Compared to my podcast app (Antenna Pod), which only gets kicked out of memory over night when everything seems to, and which is fast and responsive even when just starting.)

Jonnax 5y ago
The Spotify application displays album art as images in a screen. They are relatively high resolution. That look good on my 4k screen. How much ram do those decoded assets take up? Your 8MB ram computer would not handle network streaming, decoding 320kbs/s audio, displaying a high resolution UI, etc. The comparison is ridiculous. There's a difference between today where people use 4k displays to back in the days when 1024x768 was high end. That's 10x the amount of pixels. - Also your complaints seem to be about the speed of your internet connection. The average person does not wait multiple seconds to play a song. Reduce the quality of your streaming if you want it to be more responsive. -- Also your phone seems to be a bad phone. Storage speed and CPU power are also factors in how fast a device runs software. My 3 year old Note 9 works perfectly fine.
xbar 5y ago
You are right. The ways in which it is terrible are obvious, but they have not been fixed. That suggests architectural or legal problems (likely in some song data/song license sync and prefetch model). Spotify isn't really a song player. It is a song license management system with arbitrary playlists referencing song data whose licensing may change. You want to access the same data under the same license. Spotify isn't sure the license hasn't changed since it last started streaming to you. The misery of such a system is exacerbated by buggy client software. Maybe if the Spotify API was more like the Stripe of music licensing systems, you'd sideload your own client.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
The real question is why does a service require a specific program to use it.
- allarm 5y ago
  As far as I remember you can use Spotify in browser, so it’s not true. I don’t really understand the rant about Spotify. In my experience it’s one of the “good” modern apps. One of the amazing features that it has is the remote playback control - I can listen to the music from my PS4 and control it from any of my devices that have Spotify installed. What they could do better is the playlist organizer, the existing one is too simple. I mostly agree that the overall quality of the modern software is subpar, comparing to the gems from the past (vim, emacs, winamp, vlc, etc), but Spotify is more or less fine.

Jonnax 5y ago

The Spotify application displays album art as images in a screen. They are relatively high resolution. That look good on my 4k screen. How much ram do those decoded assets take up? Your 8MB ram computer would not handle network streaming, decoding 320kbs/s audio, displaying a high resolution UI, etc. The comparison is ridiculous. There's a difference between today where people use 4k displays to back in the days when 1024x768 was high end. That's 10x the amount of pixels. - Also your complaints seem to be about the speed of your internet connection. The average person does not wait multiple seconds to play a song. Reduce the quality of your streaming if you want it to be more responsive. -- Also your phone seems to be a bad phone. Storage speed and CPU power are also factors in how fast a device runs software. My 3 year old Note 9 works perfectly fine.

xbar 5y ago

You are right. The ways in which it is terrible are obvious, but they have not been fixed. That suggests architectural or legal problems (likely in some song data/song license sync and prefetch model). Spotify isn't really a song player. It is a song license management system with arbitrary playlists referencing song data whose licensing may change. You want to access the same data under the same license. Spotify isn't sure the license hasn't changed since it last started streaming to you. The misery of such a system is exacerbated by buggy client software. Maybe if the Spotify API was more like the Stripe of music licensing systems, you'd sideload your own client.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

The real question is why does a service require a specific program to use it.

allarm 5y ago
As far as I remember you can use Spotify in browser, so it’s not true. I don’t really understand the rant about Spotify. In my experience it’s one of the “good” modern apps. One of the amazing features that it has is the remote playback control - I can listen to the music from my PS4 and control it from any of my devices that have Spotify installed. What they could do better is the playlist organizer, the existing one is too simple. I mostly agree that the overall quality of the modern software is subpar, comparing to the gems from the past (vim, emacs, winamp, vlc, etc), but Spotify is more or less fine.