Spotify - how does it work?

[rupert the dog]

I've been on Spotify since it started,and I think it's fantastic that I can listen to almost any music that I want to, for free, just for the sake of a few ads now and then. But I don't understand how it works. Thousands (millions?) of people all listening to their choice of music at the same time?? Black magic voodoo, someone tell me how they do it.

[marshalla]

A local cache, on your disk, for tracks you've listened to.

It used to use a form of peer to peer network to let you get a track into your cache from someone else's computer, and if you have an old client it may still try to use that.

But now relies on lots and lots of servers and a very fast connection to t'Internet for anything they have to deliver in person.

Edited by marshalla on Friday 29th April 22:37

[Monty Python]

marshalla said:

A local cache, on your disk, for tracks you've listened to.

It used to use a form of peer to peer network to let you get a track into your cache from someone else's computer, and if you have an old client it may still try to use that.

But now relies on lots and lots of servers and a very fast connection to t'Internet for anything they have to deliver in person.

Edited by marshalla on Friday 29th April 22:37

Does that mean that the more music you listen to the more space it takes up on your HD/SSD?

[marshalla]

Monty Python said:

Does that mean that the more music you listen to the more space it takes up on your HD/SSD?

Up to a preset limit, yes. Root around in Preferences and you should find a way to alter the limit and/or empty the cache if you want to.

[mizx]

marshalla said:

Up to a preset limit, yes. Root around in Preferences and you should find a way to alter the limit and/or empty the cache if you want to.

It only allows you to change the cache location, supposedly.

You can also set the cache by editing the prefs file in C:\Users\*\AppData\Roaming\Spotify, but neither do anything for me, it still fills up the cache folders in AppData\Local. I'm not sure if deleting can break anything so I just reinstall it occasionally when my OS partition drops under 10GB free (I've seen it cache upwards of 4GB). Annoyingly the installer they use doesn't allow you to choose to install on another drive, even if you run the installer from there, so you can't get around it that way either.

Reinstalling only takes a minute so is an easy way to do it, but it does mean having to re-add local files and save them again in Spotify. In fact the later is a pretty useful tip if anyone doesn't know about it:

If there are missing Albums for an artist you have saved in Spotify, obviously you can aquire them and add as local files; but, if you click the Album names in the Local files list and "Save to my music" for each, they will show up among the Spotify tracks under Artists you have, so you don't even need to touch the Local file list which isn't filterable and you can shuffle both properly.

Also, if you do add local files that way, if you have Spotify open on the PC that has the local files and you are on the local network (it may actually be doing it over internet) with phone/tablet, you can transfer the local files in exactly the same way as selecting Spotify tracks to download for offline.

Edited by mizx on Monday 2nd May 17:58