Oscar Rylin's dashboard

A comment on the problem "Help!!!I can't even get started!!! 'Sorry, unhandled error: user not found'!!!" in Spotify:

It's easter.
Deal with it. – Oscar Rylin, on April 13, 2009 12:10

A comment on the problem "Spotify randomly stops playing" in Spotify:

Eh, port 80 is HTTP, not peer to peer. – Oscar Rylin, on March 27, 2009 18:40

Oscar Rylin marked one of Fringan's replies in Spotify as useful. Fringan replied to the question "API out soon or do we create our own ugly hacks?".

A comment on the question "API out soon or do we create our own ugly hacks?" in Spotify:

Awesome.
Hadn't heard bout that :D – Oscar Rylin, on February 24, 2009 13:17

Oscar Rylin replied on February 23, 2009 22:35 to the question "API out soon or do we create our own ugly hacks?" in Spotify:

Come on guys, it's been four months.
Even I'm getting impatient

I know it's only been roughly a month since Mr. Ehn apologized for the delays, but it's been a long one with way too much snow, ice and cold, and not enough hot cocoa and late night hacking :(

Oscar Rylin marked one of macf13nd's replies in Spotify as useful. macf13nd replied to the question "You are pronouncing Spotify incorrectly! Think 'Notify'...".

Oscar Rylin reported a problem in Spotify on February 07, 2009 22:43:

80-100% CPU usage

Ever since the last update (rev 40776), I'm seeing Spotify use 80 - 100% CPU every once in a while on my Macbook (10.5.6, all updates, plenty of free RAM, nothing else hogging the CPU).
The problem doesn't go away on its own, but needs a restart.

So far, I haven't seen a pattern to when it occurs.
Anyone else affected?

Oscar Rylin replied on February 07, 2009 22:37 to the question "You are pronouncing Spotify incorrectly! Think 'Notify'..." in Spotify:

Given that I've actually visited the Spotify HQ and even (gasp, shock, horror!) conversed with several employees (i.e., heard it from the horse's mouth), I can only conclude that the OP needs a cluepon.

Failing to believe that, you can always consult a book on English grammar.
Words ending in ify (or efy) have the accent on the preceding syllable.

"Notify" comes from the French notifier and the Latin notus (thus the "note-ify" pronounciation).
Consider most other -ify words such as solidify, mummify, classify, simplify, identify...

I'm seriously hoping this thread was meant as a joke, but do try and understand that if you're the only one pronouncing a word a certain way, odds are you're wrong.

End of lesson.

A comment on the problem "Spotify randomly stops playing" in Spotify:

I'm guessing it's meant as a first line support or so.
The problem outlined earlier in the thread is fixed (at least not affecting me any more), so anything new might be easier to handle via alternate means.

Hope they manage to help though! – Oscar Rylin, on February 01, 2009 20:39

A comment on the problem "Spotify randomly stops playing" in Spotify:

It's most likely bandwidth related.
What ISP do you have?

Also, note what Andres said five days ago: contact the support team. – Oscar Rylin, on February 01, 2009 15:02

A comment on the problem "Spotify randomly stops playing" in Spotify:

They DID fix it when it showed up earlier.
For all you know, this could be a different problem showing the same symptoms.
Maybe you should try emailing support. – Oscar Rylin, on January 26, 2009 22:09

A comment on the problem "Spotify randomly stops playing" in Spotify:

You'll need to start Spotify with the -console switch to enable console output.
If that doesn't do the trick, you might want to get ahold of a cmd.exe to run instead, i.e. wine cmd.exe /k spotify.exe -console

Insert quotation marks and backslashes as necessary ;)
Otherwise, if wine apps generate anything similar to Windows' event logs, it might appear in there by default.. God knows my system.log (os x) is filled with Spotify messages.

HTH. – Oscar Rylin, on January 26, 2009 21:14

A comment on the problem "Spotify randomly stops playing" in Spotify:

BBB 100/10 here.
As above, I had problems with the stutters, but after Spotify fixed it, it's been working without a hitch for me. – Oscar Rylin, on January 26, 2009 20:06

A comment on the question "top list" in Spotify:

Works here, except I don't use the top lists :-/
Have you tried emailing support? – Oscar Rylin, on January 26, 2009 19:59

A comment on the problem "Spotify randomly stops playing" in Spotify:

That's a really high latency you have there...
What kind of connection do you have? Is anything else using the connection? – Oscar Rylin, on January 26, 2009 16:57

A comment on the problem "Sound is very flat and empty" in Spotify:

There's a beta running over the weekend with different sound characteristics (see http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/to... ). So far, I'm liking it a lot, and I wouldn't be too surprised to see some of the changes flow out into the normal client fairly soon.. at least I'm hoping they will, but they did say they were only testing atm. – Oscar Rylin, on January 25, 2009 11:37

A comment on the problem "Sound is very flat and empty" in Spotify:

Aye, I'm with you all the way :)
Double the cost for FLAC would be money well spent, but I strongly believe we're in the minority -- I think it's great they managed to get people to pony up just to have ads removed, and I hope more premium differentiators are on the way (higher quality, smart playlists etc.).

I believe the most economical way for them to handle the increased distribution costs would be inexpensive on-demand cache servers located in the ISPs' networks. That way, the ISPs' cost comes down a lot as they only need to stream a song a few times a month, and Spotify only needs to send a song to each ISP a few times.

A side benefit of that is the ISPs could transmit at full speed within their own network at virtually no cost, which would be great for our bandwidth impaired friends in the UK, US, Australia etc. – Oscar Rylin, on January 25, 2009 11:19

A comment on the question "What is your source for the music?" in Spotify:

All signs point to the customer-facing servers storing them encrypted and encoded in the quality we receive, with the lossless files being stored elsewhere.

IIRC, during the closed beta, the songs were MP3s and were re-encoded towards the end of it.

Basically, having the songs pre-encoded and encrypted before the songs get sent to us customers is the only way they can scale properly; otherwise they'd be using massive amounts of CPU every single second (and thus have a very high electricity bill) -- not to mention could end up being slightly different between encodes, and would break the p2p nature of distribution. – Oscar Rylin, on January 25, 2009 10:57

A comment on the problem "Sound is very flat and empty" in Spotify:

WAV is around 12Mbps -- most people can't handle that, plus it would incur hefty fees for the Spotify platform (since, you know, they have to store every song on their servers in whatever format(s) the end users get to listen to).

We (i.e. some of us in the community) are hoping for FLAC support some time in the future.
FLAC is a lossless codec with bit rates much lower than those of WAV.
See http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/to... for the discussion on that topic.
In the end though, I don't think it makes much sense to offer uncompressed music if only (or even less than) one percent of the customer base can make use of it.

Don't get me wrong though; I have the bandwidth for it and would love to see FLAC in Spotify, but I just don't see it happening in the foreseeable future. – Oscar Rylin, on January 25, 2009 10:46

A comment on the problem "Spotify randomly stops playing" in Spotify:

On the other hand, I'm one of the people who were affected by the earlier outlined problems, and it's perfectly fine now.
What ISP do you have?
Could be them filtering or limiting p2p traffic. – Oscar Rylin, on January 23, 2009 19:09