Jon Åslund's dashboard

Jon Åslund replied on November 23, 2009 14:51 to the problem "Only last track of album(s) shown" in Spotify:

Yes. Such tracks are listed in red. However, you discovered a bug in our content ingestion system. Thanks.

The data we received from the label had weird artist names and we had trouble parsing that. We will fix this eventually but it has not the highest prio right now.

A workaround if you want to listen to the albums now is to search for the name and play from the search result.

http://open.spotify.com/search/magick...

Jon Åslund replied on October 26, 2009 19:21 to the question "Error for MBID in Metadata API lookup on Albums" in Spotify:

Thanks. Should be fixed for all new queries. Your example and everything you have tried so far is still in the cache which I won't force clean right now. It will fix itself after a few hours.

Hoping for great things as well.

A comment on the question "How long will it take until an uploaded recording will show in Spotify?" in Spotify:

No, it's still the same. When material, metadata, pictures etc have been uploaded, it usually takes a few days. – Jon Åslund, on July 21, 2009 17:06

Jon Åslund replied on February 05, 2009 23:38 to the idea "Auto-Link Albums when there's a country restriction" in Spotify:

This specific example and others like it will be merged ("auto-linked" as you call it) soon. It's harder to merge tracks on two album which are roughly the same, like a different track order or one of the albums has an extra bonus track. Hopefully, we will have a solution for that as well. Some record labels have also promised to not create many different almost identical versions for different countries in the future.

Jon Åslund reported a problem in Get Satisfaction on February 04, 2009 11:16:

Wrong anchor link for new replies in company_activity.rss

I am following the rss feed http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/co... of new topics and replies for spotify.

The anchor links for new replies are missing reply_

This
http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/to...

should be

http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/to...

Jon Åslund replied on February 02, 2009 21:19 to the problem "Greyed song titles that shouldn't be grey" in Spotify:

Correct. They should not. This is a bug with our metadata ingestion.

The ones listed with other artists separated with a comma are specified as multiple artists, of which one is Josh Groban. The greyed out titles are specified as one artist named "Josh Groban (With Deep Forest)" which is not equal to Josh Groban.

This will be fixed eventually, but it has currently low prio.

Jon Åslund replied on January 08, 2009 21:46 to the question "What is your source for the music?" in Spotify:

For all the people following these threads in English. the örjan, yes, we receive an enormous amount of files. Yes, we have our own servers, lots of them. No, we don't have lots of people putting all those files into Spotify. We do however have a few smart people who know how to create smart programs to make a computer handle it all for us.

Jon Åslund replied on January 08, 2009 21:34 to the problem "Blank artist description" in Spotify:

Yes, that's a known bug. It probably shouldn't show it all then. If you do a search for Led Zeppelin you get an artist page without tracks, but with a biography.

Jon Åslund replied on January 08, 2009 21:29 to the question "How long will it take until an uploaded recording will show in Spotify?" in Spotify:

It usually takes a few days.

Jon Åslund replied on January 08, 2009 21:14 to the question "Var kommer all musik ifrån?" in Spotify:

Jag skrev ett svar på engelska i en annan tråd varifrån musiken kommer.
http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/to...

Biografier, artistbilder och recensioner kommer främst från AMG. http://www.allmusic.com/

Anledningen till att flera skivbolag gjort likadant är med stor sannolikhet att de ville vara med på Apples iTunes Music Store när den öppnade för några år sedan.

Jon Åslund replied on January 08, 2009 21:02 to the question "What is your source for the music?" in Spotify:

We get files in lossless formats (flac, wma lossless, wav, apple lossless) from the labels.

The big labels (Universal, EMI, Sony, Warner) have their own tech departments. They encode to the standard "cd quality" directly from the master recordings, which are usually in even higher quality. No cds involved.

Some of the small labels are part of an aggregator, for instance The Orchard and PIAS. Small labels and aggregators usually use some kind of digital distribution platform. The Orchard has its own tech department and distribution platform, but others use for instance Consolidated Independent or Dicentia, but there are many many more. The small labels probably send their cds to the (possibly many different) digital distrubition platforms that they use, which then rips the cds and sends us the lossless files the metadata for the files.

Jon Åslund replied on December 19, 2008 17:27 to the question "Can we get traditional/Simplified Chinese text instead of "Pinyin"" in Spotify:

From some record companies we get pinyin, from others we get traditional/simplified Chinese characters. We use what we get.

Allmusic does not have any Chinese characters in their metadata. Musicbrainz have some.

If we match a Chinese pinyin album from a record company to an album with Chinese characters in Musicbrainz (it is possible but extremely rare when matching with PUID, acoustic fingerprinting), we will overwrite the pinyin with Chinese characters.

We want to have all different ways of describing an album, so that you can search with either pinyin or Chinese characters and then be presented with either pinyin or Chinese characters or both. We are today unfortunately quite far away from this goal.

Jon Åslund replied on December 01, 2008 19:58 to the question "Spotify-streaming won't start on ubuntu-computer" in Spotify:

We have had reports of this before during the closed beta, but never found a solution and people have other audio problems with wine as well (see: http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/to... ). The factors seem to be soundcard, used output on soundcard (ie s/pdif or analog), driver, sound server, wine, used sounddevice and settings in wine and spotify and all the different versions. We haven't found a common pattern yet.

Can you give me some info on your system by running these commands in a shell:


lspci | grep -i audio
cat /proc/asound/modules
cat /proc/asound/cards
cat /proc/asound/version
uname -r
dpkg -l libasound2 | grep libasound2
dpkg -l wine | grep wine
grep -e DefaultSampleRate -e HardwareAcceleration -e Audio .wine/user.reg


It works for me on two computers. I run Version 0.3.8 (revision 32541) on Debian without a sound server (such as esound or pulse audio which I think is default in Ubuntu now) on both.

At work I use analog headphone speaker out and these settings:


$ lspci | grep -i audio
00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
$ cat /proc/asound/modules
0 snd_intel8x0
$ cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [ICH7 ]: ICH4 - Intel ICH7
Intel ICH7 with AD1981B at irq 23
$ cat /proc/asound/version
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.16.
$ uname -r
2.6.26-1-686
$ dpkg -l libasound2 | grep libasound2
ii libasound2 1.0.16-2 ALSA library
$ dpkg -l wine | grep wine
ii wine 1.0.1-1 Windows API implementation - standard suite
$ grep -e DefaultSampleRate -e HardwareAcceleration -e Audio .wine/user.reg
"DefaultSampleRate"="44100"
"HardwareAcceleration"="Emulation"
"Audio"="alsa"


At home I use digital s/pdif out and these settings:


$ lspci | grep -i audio
00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
$ cat /proc/asound/modules
0 snd_hda_intel
1 snd_pcsp
$ cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [NVidia ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
HDA NVidia at 0xfe024000 irq 22
1 [pcsp ]: PC-Speaker - pcsp
Internal PC-Speaker at port 0x61
$ cat /proc/asound/version
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.16.
$ uname -r
2.6.26-1-686
$ dpkg -l libasound2 | grep libasound2
ii libasound2 1.0.16-2 ALSA library
$ dpkg -l wine | grep wine
ii wine 1.0.1-1 Windows API implementation - standard suite
$ grep -e DefaultSampleRate -e HardwareAcceleration -e Audio .wine/user.reg
"DefaultSampleRate"="44100"
"HardwareAcceleration"="Emulation"
"Audio"="alsa"


Jon Åslund replied on November 25, 2008 22:56 to the question "Search cannot find artist "!!!" ("chk chk chk") but finds their albums" in Spotify:

Yes, exclamation marks are filtered out. We are aware of this search problem regarding artists, albums and tracks named only with characters that we filter out and will fix that eventually.

Jon Åslund replied on November 23, 2008 13:38 to the question "Why aren't the remixer shown?" in Spotify:

This is a bug in our music import step and will be fixed eventually. Can't give an exact date.

Jon Åslund replied on October 30, 2008 21:54 to the question "Opening links on Linux (under wine) error" in Spotify:

If you get an error message saying "Invalid Option: /asdfasdf" it means spotify.exe has been called with the option /asdfasdf which is invalid. It should be /uri. Try

cd .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Spotify/
wine spotify.exe /uri spotify:track:6ZfQcyIgFHPXKzemNwjRIp

That should work.

I should note however that I can't get firefox 3 (or epiphany) to execute the browser2spotify script (or anything at all for external protocols), so I can't verify it through the browser.

A workaround is to just paste the url or uri into the search field. If it's a track link and you don't want to play it directly (which happens when you click on track links), you can click on "Play queue" and then press ctrl+v to put it in the queue.

Jon Åslund replied on October 30, 2008 20:11 to the problem "Linux Wine window misplacement" in Spotify:

What version of wine do you use? Also, does the window behave differently if it is maximized or not?

Jon Åslund replied on October 21, 2008 23:40 to the problem "Robbie Williams is listed in the Jamiroquai artist radio" in Spotify:

Some of the artists in an artist radio are from that artist's list of similar artists (top five you can see on the artist page). We currently get information about similar artists from Allmusic.

http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&...

We are fully aware that data like this is subjective.

Jon Åslund replied on October 18, 2008 14:59 to the question "Why don't you add the complete "name" for all the songs?????" in Spotify:

This is a known problem, we have a solution and it will be fixed shortly. Some record companies sometimes separate title and version. Adding the version to the title is very good for albums like the above where you both want the information to be searchable and to be able to distinguish between the different versions on the album. Sometimes, when the version is the same for almost all tracks on an album and it says something like (2008 digital remaster), then it is mostly uninteresting.

Jon Åslund replied on October 13, 2008 14:24 to the idea "Reporting bad meta data" in Spotify:

That would be neat indeed. We are considering adding metadata editing/reporting capabilities to the client.

For now, the best way to get metadata changes into Spotify is to look up the album on Musicbrainz and fix the problem or add the album if it doesn't already exist. Eventually, the fixes will end up in Spotify.

Musicbrainz is a collaborative database, sort of like Wikipedia, but for music only and much more structured.