>Google Play Music, Apple Music, Groove Music
>noticeable buffering, usually 0.5-1.5 seconds before playing streamed tracks
>Spotify
>plays tracks INSTANTLY with seemingly zero buffering latency, as if they were being played from your local drive
How does Spotify do it? What Star Trek-tier tech do they use?
>>55214783
Can you download albums from spurtify to listen to offline?
>>55214783
its pretty easy to stream music buddy, it doesnt take long to receive enough bytes in a stream to start playing it. the other sites just like to prefuffer a bit before it plays
>>55214805
Yes, but you have to export them as playlists first.
https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/search_play/listen-offline/
Data compression.
>>55214805
yes.
>>55214818
i can't understand why Rdio and other streaming services did/do demand to buffer more. the user experience really suffers. it feels like your device is drunk (or more practically, like it's lagging), which is incredibly frustrating.
as for OP, i vaguely remember there being some peer to peer thing going on at one point, but i might just be thinking of distributed CDNs and not full on peer nodes. i imagine we'd all notice on our bills/battery lives if our devices were acting as nodes in a torrent swarm.
>>55214783
The only thing that makes me use spotify is the suggestion algorythm tbqh
It suggested me some new incredible bands and some old that I've forgotten long ago. It's a shame that it doesn't have Tool tho
>>55214825
you can actually save albums (at least on your phone). it might automatically create a new playlist and mark that for offline storage though. i forget how it works.
>>55214841
IT'S MIDDLE-OUT I AIN'T GOTTA EXPLAIN SHIT
>>55214783
They have a few select tracks from each playlist saved on your device.
That's why if you restart and open up the same playlist in a place with poor reception, you'll get to listen to the same 2-3 tracks most of the time
>>55214849
not sure but they could also be prebuffering music before you hit play
>>55214888
>They have a few select tracks from each playlist saved on your device.
this can't apply to everything, though, can it? if i search for an album on my phone and i've never listened to it before, it can't possibly have prefetched it.
my hunch is that spotify might do what youtube and netflix do - stream the lowest quality version just to get the ball rolling, and then slowly fade it out while fading in the higher fidelity audio. and you can just save the higher quality audio if the person wants to keep it offline
>>55214783
not to mention it is cheap as fuck
in my country it cost only 0.194 usd for first three months and a dollar in next months
>>55214916
yeah but again if you're looking at a list of let's say 20 songs spotify would be taking a big gamble unnecessarily prefetching even the first 5 seconds of each song.
i'm assuming here that spotify's major costs are A) hosting/serving that much content and B) paying royalties. could be wrong, but i can't imagine a third cost being anywhere near those two. in that case, prefetching on 1/10 or 1/20 chances (if you prefetch 20 songs and listen to 1, then you wasted the resources serving 19 snippets) seems pretty wasteful for a profit-seeking company.
>>55214919
I think they prefetch a bit instantly. Especially if you go onto an album specifically.
>>55214978
I mean if there's evidence of that I would believe it, but the rationale in >>55214958 makes me think otherwise.
I would definitely believe that {every user}+{every song} can be computed a score indicating the probability that the user will want to listen to that song, and using that score (basically some trivial ML) spotify might determine whether to prefetch a song. But prefetching even the first few seconds of *every* song in an album, scaled to every user, would represent an enormous burden for them, and one that would necessarily not pan out 95% of the time (if you ALWAYS choose a song in an album you navigate to, then you only play 1/20, and the high priority prefetching of 19 other songs turns out to be unnecessary).
I can imagine lots of clever optimizations that Spotify might make though; like if you're listening to a playlist and it's not locally stored, Spotify could defer your download of the next track(s) for as much as a few minutes without you necessarily knowing. If you just let the song play to the end, they would have ~2-3 minutes to do relatively complex load balancing and whatnot.
It's probably unlikely that they do really cool shit like that, but they *could*, and that'd be really cool. A lot of internet services sort of benefit from instant responses - Amazon loses some percentage of business for every 100ms they delay the page loading, etc... - but in Spotify's case they have a unique situation where that's not quite the case for most of the traffic they're serving.
>streaming music
>>55214783
>>55214841
>>55214865
what did you eat for breakfast today?
>>55215180
I know. It's fucking glorious.
I wrote an adblocker for spotify. Since you NEETs can't afford premium, this might be of interest to you: https://github.com/mahkoh/spotblock
Sounds like your shit internet senpai. I have no problems with Goygle Play Music and at least the musicians get some money from it.
