Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Tiered home/mobile/both subscriptions would make sense.

how great is the loss each time, and what's the best way around it? ie. save each subsequent file at 320 or wav? is it the case that re-saving a 192 mp3 x number of times would result in an mp3 of nothing more than white noise?

I suspect, though I'm not sure, that when you open an MP3 in SoundForge or Audacity or Adobe Audition (is that what they call CoolEdit now? You can see I'm five years behind the times), you're not editing the MP3 as such. The application has effectively "unpacked" it into something it can edit, so there's a something akin to raw 16/44.1k (or whatever the application is set to) PCM audio in its memory (though the audio still has the lossy frequency profile of the original MP3).

You save this back out as an MP3 and its quality is dependent on (i) the quality of the original (i.e., it can't exceed it) and (ii) the quality of the software's MP3 encoder (which may be inferior to whatever application originally created the file).

I may be wrong about this but I think repeatedly editing MP3s doesn't eventually degrade them to mush, but rather you're just imposing the quality of the editing software's encoder on the file each time. Safest way is, indeed, to write out as WAV and only compress to MP3 as your final step. (In photo processing software, you're effectively going JPEG > TIFF > JPEG).

These fuckers seem to be advertising to me after every 1 or 2 songs now, it's fucking ridiculous. I could understand it when it was a long jazz piece or whatever, but now I just want to murder them.

does the frequency of ads depend on when you sign on? it definitely seems to vary

> The application has effectively "unpacked" it into something it can edit, so there's a something akin to raw 16/44.1k (or whatever the application is set to) PCM audio in its memory (though the audio still has the lossy frequency profile of the original MP3).

typically they use floating point internally. (so there's another loss of precision there...)

but generally if you have something that's 99% perfect and re-encode it you'll have something that's 99% * 99% perfect = 98.01% perfect. keep doing that and it soon drops. it's largely a case of where your acceptability threshold is.

These fuckers seem to be advertising to me after every 1 or 2 songs now, it's fucking ridiculous.

Yeah, the ads have increased, definitely. I was listening last night and adverts came after one song then another after a further two songs then three. I don't know if it goes on like that, or is always like that but fuck. It's particularly annoying when your listening is inturrupted just for an ad about Spotify itself.

It's still not publicly available, is it? I wouldn't put it past Apple to raise some kind of last-minute objection.

They'd be crazy, but ...

― grimly fiendish, Monday, July 27, 2009 12:17 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark

Apple has been denying shit left and right. They just rejected the Google Voice app.

man I saw her naked man...NNNGH

yes, if you slept with her it kinda follows that you saw her naked you fucking retard

public information announcements: not what they were

If anyone uses foxytunes on firefox it now has spotify support now.
http://blog.foxytunes.net/2009/07/08/foxytunes-supports-spotify/

700 year old gripe or something, annoyance may mostly be from other apps:

when I in Windows click the X in the upper right corner of a window, it means KILL. Not SLEEP IN A TRAY REQUIRING MORE EFFORT TO KILL.

Apart from that, well happy with the Spotify tbh.

and apparently now the richest man in asia (li ka-shing) has invested 50 million dollars in spotify. in other words, this thing probably isn't going away...

Thanks, Crucialmemory.com!

hate that cunt that leaves the voicemail message saying "it's great but i can't put them on my ipod"

NO GUFF, YOU DUMB CUNT.
"I like the look of all the houses in my street but hey, how come I can't just walk into any one of them and make myself at home? This blows!"

Apple refuses the Spotify iPhone app.

Hmm, the article you linked doesn't seem to say that (I can only read the translation into English you used; I don't read Swedish). It just says that Apple is taking a long time to accept it, and that this suggests a problem. Or did I miss something?

For Spotify probably ended up in a "sour cream" for specific test rather than the usual sex.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

ok what the fuck is this kate moss advert

whistling cunt advert is allover tv now

ah jesus that tune is annoying

this video contains point of view
this video contains point of view
this video contains point of view
this video contains point of view

someone's either seen nathan barley or needs to

Can someone send me an invite please?

I don't think you need an invite - but you do need to be in Europe

http://proxify.co.uk works for Ireland (not officially available here yet)

I'm in America :(

I invite you to Europe

new spotify pet hate — well, music advertising in general pet hate — playing five seconds of that's not my name before announcer is all "THIS dramaticpause IS THE TING TINGS!" — while you're collecting data on my listening habits how about you work out I KNOW THAT ALREADY

i am very angry about having free music!

can't be very good if they're giving it away

how do you search for specific labels?

Spotify app approved for iPhone

Yikes.

Hallelujah!!!

how do you search for specific labels?

Put label:labelname in the search box, with quotes around it if it's more than one word.

find spotify a bit of an anti-climax, like i was really excited by it when i first downloaded it now i only use it to play "if you wanna be happy" by jimmy soul when i get drunk.

I wondered why the last 3000 tracks on your last.fm was that song.

spotify for iphone not tht big a deal in practice tho - it'll chew batteries

Ya.

Spotify has turned my whole listening behaviour upside down. From using iTunes almost exclusively for my music, I now use Spotify 90% of the time (on my iPod I tend to listen to podcasts, not music). Maybe I"m just bored with my iTunes Library (and the effort that goes in to updating it), but Spotify is the path of least resistance for me.

Will it chew batteries even with cached playlists and so forth?

Presumably they'll roll out versions for Blackberries/other smartphones now? Or have Apple snagged them into some kind of exclusivity thing?

My excitement centres around being able to use Spotify in the office, as audio streaming is streng verboten around these parts. So battery life isn't a major issue.

Presumably they'll roll out versions for Blackberries/other smartphones now? Or have Apple snagged them into some kind of exclusivity thing?

― Tuncay Stryder (Matt DC), Friday, 28 August 2009 08:55 (48 minutes ago) Bookmark

I had been wondering why there's never been any talk of Spotify on any other phones. I can't see exclusivity though. I hope.

If there's enough of a market and money there, they might look into it. The iPhone is just now a no-brainer for developing apps, especially of the streaming media type, because of market share and enthusiasm. As far as Apple's concerned, they're a competitor of sorts and it was questionable whether they were going to get approved when the app store review process is such a black box.

I thought I read about some Spotify/Android thing going?

Yeah - at the end of the BBC story linked to above.

Does anyone know anything more concrete about what the finances of this are like for artists? The only thing I've seen is this Guardian article, which seems to suggest they're pretty bad:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/aug/17/major-labels-spotify

Have any other major (or even minor) artists had their catalogues pulled?

In Sweden, where Spotify has been running the longest, Magnus Uggla – well-established since the late 70s – has withdrawn his music from the service. On his blog he said that, after six months on the site he'd earned "what a mediocre busker could earn in a day". Regarding his record label, Sony Music, he says "after suing the shit out of Pirate Bay, they're acting just like them by not paying the artists". When he found out that Sony had 5.8% equity in Spotify he wrote: "I would rather be raped by Pirate Bay than fucked up the ass by (Sony boss) Hasse Breitholtz and Sony Music and will remove all of my songs from Spotify pending an honest service."

I was told by a guy who considered investing in Spotify to a significant level, and who therefore took a look at the books, that the company makes fourteen pence per user, per year and his prediction was that they'd be dead before the end of this year. That was before the iphone deal but I'm not sure whether he considers them any more viable an entity subsequently.

The problem it seems to me, and this may have been mentioned, is that the adverts aren't intrusively frequent enough to steer the user toward the subscription version. I guess it's a tricky balance but it seems to me if they had more adverts they'd generate more revenue from both versions of the program.

does anyone know offhand how long they've been offering the subscription model?

Yes to the above, and in my month or so of using it I've gotten mostly ads for Spotify itself. That can't be good for their bottom line.