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 much point if they do as you would need to go online to play any new tracks.
4) Set cache size really small. (someone reported this doesn't work) Wouldn't this mean a big spike in downloads as none of your songs are cached?
Its crappy. I remember when I used to play counter-strike and I would have to shut down Spotify as it would kill my ping and make the game lag terribly. Launching in game radio though would be fine...
Asking free members to suck it up is fine. They are using the service for free and get a few ad's. Another cost to service is fine.
For paid members though there needs to be an option to drastically tune down the upload rate and even disable it if you are not listening to music yourself.
Spotify have been inactive on this issue to date. My hopes are fairly low that they will resolve it any time soon.
I'm often left confuddled at these spikes as I won't have anything open I would consider requires much bandwith. Also, even though I would have high latency, opening a browser and navigating through sites would work as smoothly as ever.
Now I know to look at spotify specifically and I would not be very surprised if my spikes of bad internet activity are a result of spotify leeching my upload.
While I think it makes sense for spotify to use p2p in their system, I would have thought there would have been an indication of it in the options with an option to disable such services.
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.
All in all, I just didn't find the service that interesting unless you consider the technological angle.
For the premium users, I do wonder if any of the open source spotify clients would alleviate this?
My concern woud be: Am I violating TOS when i don't share 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 uploading.
We run into this issue with Skype constantly too. People want to use these programs, and have valid reasons to use them. But our business cannot accept the risk of peer to peer traffic on our protected network, so away they go. If there was even the slightest bit of obscure and dangerous and unsupported configuration options that left a backdoor to being able to turn off the p2p, I would love it. But there's not.
Or... get your security monitoring tool to stop reporting legitimate P2P protocols as a security threat.
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.
Little did I know I was paying $10/GB to let others listen to music.
Thanks, Spotify, thanks.
I would expect other developers to do the same.
This "well you should have known about obscure UNIX command X" stuff is both why software still sucks, and why business people make mega bucks while technical people are capped at $120K salaries.
I don't see anybody offering to refund my lost bandwidth, though.
And it's not just decent/nice to ask user if your app is about to suddenly use 100% of upload speed in the background - it's common sense.
Im not saying using p2p in spotify is bad, I just want it to be more obvious and at least a way to control its max upload rate in the program itself. The fact that people need to download a 3rd party app to limit spotify from swamping their internet connection is stupid.
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?
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.
/
/
/
/Then they get 0% of my bandwidth. I suppose there's enough lazy/unaware people that it doesn't matter.
Looking into how it behaves there.
http://monkey.org/~marius/pages/?page=trickle
[Edit] I see someone else has linked to trickle above.
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.
Spotify should cap the speed at like 128KB/s, because that should be plenty for what they are doing. If they were using my full connection, I would be furious, because I'm not a data center for them, and I know how much data centers charge for bandwidth, and they would be getting an insane deal (my home connection is 100/100Mb).
It should probably have a cap for how long they are using your connection also. Once you've shared as much as you've downloaded, your connection should either stop sharing or go to an even lower speed.
Apart form that, that's really no news, you could read about that for years.
It should be optional. (Not everyone has a very good upstream and unlimited bandwidth.)
And it's not like spotify is the only way of getting music for free
Question: What is the best way to traffic shape all upstream connections on OS X? I've tried ipfw but I can't figure out a good way to e.g. limit the upload on all apps except for e.g. SSH.
0: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/
1: http://mattgemmell.com/2011/07/25/network-link-conditioner-i...
2: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin...
The Spotify Android app has consumed almost 250 MB of data on WiFi and about another 100 MB on 3G/4G this month alone. Does anyone else have this issue?
(For anyone that doesn't know, Android provides the data usage of each app in the settings panel.)
http://i45.tinypic.com/2vc8f0j.jpg%5B/IMG%5D
Thats from this morning
Add statistics and allow users to control how much they upload. For every TB uploaded, one month free premium!
So, if it is not streaming, then you are streaming.
Anyway, quite entertaining to monitor its port traffic on my Mac:
perl -e'while(1){%x=map{$_=>$x{$_}+1}grep/spotify/i,`lsof -i -P`;print for grep{$x{$_}<2}keys%x;sleep 1}'
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...
It's almost laughable the amount of connections it attempts to make to outside clients.
Anyways, the solution for me is simply to block all outgoing traffic to spotify that isn't directly to its streaming servers. Problem solved, no more outside peers eating up my upstream bandwidth.
(another reason was them updating their TOS, and showing the whole thing instead of showing only what has been updated; thus encouraging people to agree without reading — Not ethical at all)
I've found this to be the best solution.
- They don't effectively communicate this with users. They do let people know, but you have to dig to find it.
- There should be a paid tier where this can be opt out of.