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Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

community.spotify.com

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Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#41

Post by taylorbuley »

I didn't know this. Although as a tech reporter I should have, I would argue that typical people are unaware of these kinds of architectural implications and that without obvious disclosure this design decision sort of takes advantage of users.

Customers are paying twice, for the service and for other people's data, and it shouldn't take a Hacker News-level understanding of technology for them to be aware of this fact. It feels icky and reminds me of when I found out that Dropbox was "sharing" my files with other users: http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/04/how-dropbox-sacrifices-u...

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#42

Post by MetricMike »

crazygringo wrote: post #35

What is the best way, under OSX or Windows, to selectively limit upload (or download) speeds per-application ? Is there a way? It would be so nice if something like this were built into the OS, but is there any kind of third-party software which will do that?

http://superuser.com/questions/135719/windows-program-to-lim...

NetLimiter (free) and NetBalancer (paid, free for 5 processes) have been the go-to solutions for Windows for a little while.

IceFloor (http://www.hanynet.com/icefloor/index.html) is the OSX (10.7+) analog.

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#43

Post by doktrin »

iamben wrote: post #10

If you're using premium, why not just download the albums / playlists you want and set Spotify into 'Offline Mode'?

That's a labor intensive solution to a problem which should not exist in the first place.

Speaking as a premium subscriber, I really value simple music discovery. I would be downloading or purchasing my own music if I felt strongly about micro managing my collection.

If I feel like coding to someone else's 2000 track psychedelic trance playlist which I just happened across - I would like to do so without mucking around with some monstrous download (or, even worse, having to spend time cherry picking tracks I want). Likewise, perhaps I want to use classify (classical music discovery) and select a playlist based on mood. Again, creating my own playlist is at this point a simple inconvenience.

This problem shouldn't exist, and Spotify certainly owes its users some form of solution.

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#44

Post by rmrfrmrf »

to3m wrote: post #36
rmrfrmrf wrote: post #26

Surely people here know how to shape their bandwidth...?

At least one person (me) who doesn't! Sadly there isn't time to become knowledgable about everything, and I never found network administration very interesting anyway.

Which OS are you running?

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#46

Post by mcculley »

freehunter wrote: post #32
mcculley wrote: post #28

I had to ban Spotify on our office network as the clients don't take into account how many users are on the local net and scale back accordingly. It only took a handful of users to soak up a noticeable amount of upload bandwidth. That and there is an operational security issue with a program that uploads files from the local disk to untrusted peers and encrypts everything such that one cannot tell what it is uploadin…

What sucks is that here at work (I work in corporate information security), we have developers who love to listen to music when they're programming. I support it. I like listening to music too. The problem is, some of them like Spotify. And since Spotify is peer-to-peer (and p2p applications are against the policy), it gets flagged in our security monitoring tool. And when it gets flagged, I have to make that action…

I agree. If it had an option to be polite about using upload bandwidth (e.g., do a multicast advertisement to find the count of total Spotify clients and divide upload bandwidth usage by that number) and could easily be sandboxed such that you know it isn't scouring your whole filesystem for stuff to upload, I would be okay with it.

For example, it (at least last time I looked on OS X) goes poking through ~/Music/iTunes/ presumably to find music files it does not have to download. That's a little too far.

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#50

Post by radnor »

bobsy wrote: post #18

I have never liked this about Spotify... So the solutions outlined by Spotify are... 1) Suck it up. Its how the system works. 2) Use the web player. (Seems to be invite-only beta - US Only) 3) Use offline mode. Unlimited members pay for the service and cannot download tracks so not much use to those. Somewhat kills music discovery. Means you cannot use the radio option. Do social options work in offline mode? Not muc…

How about setting up a firewall rule so that Spotify can only talk to Spotify's servers? Here's a post from Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/jdhj6/is_there_a_wa...
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