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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?

#101

Post by kamjam »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #74
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…

Or use Rdio? I've never been impressed with Spotify. The experience on Rdio has been great for me.

I haven't used Spotify in a long time, but I've known it was p2p since the last time I used it in 2010, this is nothing new.

But, I almost exclusively use http://www.grooveshark.com and http://www.songza.com

Both are web based, the latter has a mobile app, both absolutely brilliant and FREE! I'll have to check out Rdio, that looks real interesting.

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

#102

Post by dromidas »

calstars wrote: post #29

Do the mobile clients also use P2P?

mobile clients have their own set of bandwidth issues. I play 1 playlist on my phone, it is available locally (all downloaded long ago), and yet spotify has used over 2gb of bandwidth in the last 20 days. There's a huge thread about it on the spotify forums somewhere.

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

#103

Post by j_s »

adrinavarro wrote: post #76
MetricMike wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sadly IceFloor doesn't seem to have an option to quickly filter out in a per-program basis. And Little Snitch, well…maybe a bit overpriced if it's just to block Spotify (hell, they should be the ones providing a setting for that).

Found this on its page, though I don't have the chance to check it out:

  > monitor applications connections , block outbound connections
  > to unwanted services (block chat, p2p...)

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

#104

Post by hammock »

nthj wrote: post #47

I commonly stream Spotify on my MacBook while tethering via my iPhone at coffee shops. Little did I know I was paying $10/GB to let others listen to music. Thanks, Spotify, thanks.

If you listen off of the mobile app, it's not p2p. I would recommend that if your phone is right next to your computer

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

#106

Post by SanjayUttam »

radnor wrote: post #50
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...

Admittedly, higher effort and probably not for the non-tech but...android emulator + mobile app would probably work too. Granted I have other qualms with their mobile app.

For the premium users, I do wonder if any of the open source spotify clients would alleviate this?

http://despotify.sourceforge.net/

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

#107

Post by Rayne »

seivan wrote: post #82
nm7 wrote: post #73

If their excuse is that their servers can't handle it then they are jokers. Plenty of services without paying customers handle more bandwidth than Spotify. Why don't they do what Netflix does and use AWS? Forcing paying customers to participate in a p2p network doesn't make any sort of sense.

None of them are as fast as Spotify.

I've seen this argument a couple of times in this thread. I used to use Spotify and now I use Rdio and I do not see a difference in speed at all. What kind of speed are we talking about? How quickly a song starts playing? I've noticed no difference, and obviously the songs can't play faster.

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

#109

Post by avree »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #81
dguaraglia wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be honest, I tried Rdio and didn't get where the "music discovery" part comes in. In the month I used it I was only suggested completely unrelated, but obviously 'featured' albums (on their "frontpage" so it wasn't even on my face.) All in all, I just didn't find the service that interesting unless you consider the technological angle.

Music discovery does suck on Rdio, granted. I find myself using other services for that. But for daily listening, the experience is much cleaner than Spotify's is, IMO.

I like the Stations on Rdio, actually. I've found some cool artists through the Echo Nest-powered discovery stuff they have.

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

#110

Post by ryandvm »

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…

> it gets flagged in our security monitoring tool. And when it gets flagged, I have to make that action stop

Or... get your security monitoring tool to stop reporting legitimate P2P protocols as a security threat.

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