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Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

engineering.atspotify.com

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Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#101

Post by vorpalhex »

tjpnz wrote: post #100

Has anyone else noticed that the quality of the Android app has really gone downhill lately? There's often a lag of a few seconds now when switching between tracks and I've noticed an issue recently where the song title/cover art doesn't always update to reflect the currently playing track. Sometimes the play/pause/skip buttons become completely unresponsive. This doesn't appear to be an issue on my end, I haven't ha…

It's bad. Unfortunately last time I tried the main competitors, TIDAL and Deezer, their app was somehow worse.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#103

Post by nine_k »

belval wrote: post #46
dotnet00 wrote: post #32

Over the past year I've taken to just buying my music and using plex/plexamp for the streaming convenience. I'd have a hard time going back to other streaming services after getting used to the convenience of having control over the entire chain. Buying music also serves as a nice way to spend digital credit from Amazon. It ends up costing me about as much as streaming.

> getting used to the convenience of having control over the entire chain What convenience is that? How do you consider that your setup is in anyway more convenient that opening the Spotify app and listening to basically anything? If you are into very niche music or something maybe, but it's pretty hard to beat just clicking "play". Now if you said you simply pirate the songs I could see the convenience of saving mon…

- Opening this setup and always finding the tracks you have. Nothing ever disappears from the catalog.

- Opening this setup and enjoying the highest quality.

- Opening this setup and having full control over playlists.

- Opening this setup overseas and still listening to the same tracks, regardless of local distribution rights.

- Opening this setup and realizing that you have already paid the artist likely more than several years of your listening on Spotify nonstop would bring them (only feels good if it's one of your favorite artists).

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#104

Post by lelandfe »

dotnet00 wrote: post #77
alar44 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have issues with Plex regularly with file formats not playing nice, incorrect box art, content being labeled completely wrong, and random server hangs. It's OK, but I wouldn't say it's more convenient than Spotify. With Spotify I do literally nothing. With Plex I have to troubleshoot now and then. I don't see how self hosting a media collection is more convenient in any way.

I haven't had an issue with server hangs or file formats (not suggesting that those can't exist), but for metadata I'm in the habit of putting all music I buy through MusicBrainz Picard which can automatically fix any errors or missing metadata fields and put them in a neat structure (Artist/Album/Song). Haven't had to manually fix any matches since that. But yes, if you don't have to do anything to have an enjoyable…

Gosh, I used to fuss over metadata constantly back when I managed my 500gb library of music. MusicBrainz would frequently mess up fields like composer, album artist, and especially remix credits and formatting of the same (using brackets instead of parentheses, "Rmx" instead of "Remix," etc)

I would go on weekend long binges of cleaning up the mess. The neurotic side of me misses having the busy work, but the practical side appreciates having the free time.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#105

Post by dijit »

regecks wrote: post #59
dijit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s unfair to say they barely break even, if they do then it’s because they’ve decided to spend so much. Looking externally at the company they’re listed as having 50,000-100,000 employees. That’s a lot of people to employ for a audio streaming service. I also happen to know their cloud commitments (I know a guy) and they are large enough that it starts to make a lot of sense to invest into physical hardware…

>Looking externally at the company they’re listed as having 50,000-100,000 employees Uhhhh. Do you mean Apple or Spotify? Spotify's 2021 Q4 press release says: >At the end of Q4, our workforce consisted of 7,690 FTEs globally.

I actually meant Spotify, I must have misread something and I’m off by an order of magnitude, LinkedIn says 10,500~ people who have Spotify as an employee on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotify/

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#106

Post by peterburkimsher »

vorpalhex wrote: post #101
tjpnz wrote: post #100

Has anyone else noticed that the quality of the Android app has really gone downhill lately? There's often a lag of a few seconds now when switching between tracks and I've noticed an issue recently where the song title/cover art doesn't always update to reflect the currently playing track. Sometimes the play/pause/skip buttons become completely unresponsive. This doesn't appear to be an issue on my end, I haven't ha…

It's bad. Unfortunately last time I tried the main competitors, TIDAL and Deezer, their app was somehow worse.

It surprises many colleagues and friends that I still use an iPod Video from 2005-6.

Life without adverts, week-long battery life, instant track skipping, ratings, playlists (and OTG playlists) make the music experience better than any streaming services, which are really just radio replacements.

Embedded systems might not be "cool" any more, but they're repairable, and have other features too (iPod notes, games, contacts, calendar), and a thriving mod firmware scene (iPodLinux and Rockbox).

There is an alternative, if you'd like to come to the hardware side :)

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#107

Post by hiptobecubic »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #106
vorpalhex wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bad. Unfortunately last time I tried the main competitors, TIDAL and Deezer, their app was somehow worse.

It surprises many colleagues and friends that I still use an iPod Video from 2005-6. Life without adverts, week-long battery life, instant track skipping, ratings, playlists (and OTG playlists) make the music experience better than any streaming services, which are really just radio replacements. Embedded systems might not be "cool" any more, but they're repairable, and have other features too (iPod notes, games, con…

You can also do this with your phone. You don't have to stream everything. Just add your files and use an app that can play music locally.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#108

Post by sususu »

benatkin wrote: post #95
superjan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don’t explain why I was logged out. I did not log out myself. Or is this “logged out” in the sense that I did not have their app active at the time of the disruption?

Logging out on a 401 is pretty common in authentication, because it gives the user an opportunity to sign in again. Maybe the problem resulted in a 401 being returned, when it would have been better to return a 500.

In the web at least it was returning 500, I guess that the desktop/mobile apps make some check in intervals. When the backend returned 500 the app thought that the current login could not be authenticated and logged out everybody

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#109

Post by seattle_spring »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #15
ge96 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lossless and Dolby Atmos sound quality General headphone recommendation? Best I have is an MDR-7506 but I don't think it's meant for listening rather producing.

With some of the banal EDM that's out there now, some retro 1980s walkman headphones would do.

Would do for... What, exactly?

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#110

Post by daguava »

I recently went to pay for a music service and wanted to give spotify a chance, but they have a huge information leak somewhere on when new accounts are created.

On the day of my free trial ending I received the first and only phishing email I've ever had from spotify telling me my trial was ending and it was time to swipe.

Up until then I had been happy with the service, but then noticed I was about to get owned.... Down to the day of expiration...

I emailed their support about how this was sketchy and they needed to do better information masking and got told their team did not consider any of this a vulnerabilty.

With this in tow, it really cast some shade on their serious engineering abilities for me.

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