Spotify launches in the US • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotify launches in the US

#271

Post by mzl » Tue, Jul 26, 2011, 6:11 AM UTC

revorad wrote: post #8

I don't understand why they don't have a web app, especially when competitors like Last.fm, Grooveshark, Turntable.fm and others do.

You can't get the same level of service in a webapp. From technical papers on Spotify, one can see that they get an average of about 250ms to start playing a song, but still their own servers only need to stream about 20% or so IIRC of the total music played.

Re: Spotify launches in the US

#272

Post by revorad » Tue, Jul 26, 2011, 7:35 AM UTC

mzl wrote: post #271

revorad wrote: post #8

I don't understand why they don't have a web app, especially when competitors like Last.fm, Grooveshark, Turntable.fm and others do.

You can't get the same level of service in a webapp. From technical papers on Spotify, one can see that they get an average of about 250ms to start playing a song, but still their own servers only need to stream about 20% or so IIRC of the total music played.

So the spotify client is doing P2P stuff completely skipping the servers? Why can't it be done in Javascript?

Re: Spotify launches in the US

#273

Post by mzl » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 6:24 AM UTC

revorad wrote: post #272

mzl wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get the same level of service in a webapp. From technical papers on Spotify, one can see that they get an average of about 250ms to start playing a song, but still their own servers only need to stream about 20% or so IIRC of the total music played.

So the spotify client is doing P2P stuff completely skipping the servers? Why can't it be done in Javascript?

The client does P2P and local caching for offloading the servers. Apart from the technical issues in doing it browser side (for example, opening TCP connections), I seriously doubt that it could be done with the same level of efficiency.

Re: Spotify launches in the US

#274

Post by mzl » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 6:28 AM UTC

revorad wrote: post #19

anti wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess there could be some uses for a web app, but the desktop app is just so much better than any flash/html5 app. Haven't touched itunes after spotify.

I use thesixtyone, earbits, grooveshark, last.fm in the browser and I have no trouble at all. The thing with music apps is that I just choose a playlist/station, hit play and forget. The UI doesn't even matter beyond that.

For a lot of people with that use-case the UI might not matter, but it is not the only use case for a streaming service. From http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/ one can see that almost 40% of tracks played are chosen actively as opposed to just continuing on to the next track.