I like to listen to music while coding. I always have. Sometimes Iâve worked at jobs where they allow this (media companies like BBC never mind developers with headphones) and some that donât (investment banks never allow this). So itâs nice when I get to do some coding at home on my own pc with my own set-up (Visual Studio 2008, twin monitors, etc) and my own music. So when Iâm at the desktop PC, I usually have iTunes open in another window.
So I have a pretty big music collectionânot tied to a specific genre. Iâm hardly a connoisseur of music and would be out of place in any conversation about music, but I know what I like.
Yesterday I heard about Spotify from a friend who raved about it. I downloaded the app and gave it a try. I think I found my new background-music application for writing code.
Spotify is a desktop application which streams music to the desktop. You can chose any song they have in their library (I have found most that Iâve looked for) and listen to whole albums, etc. When I heard about it, I thought is sounded a lot like Last.fm, which is an okay personalised-radio station service application. But Spotify seems to have no lag or buffering. It seems to download the tracks as needed in one go, without streaming. Not sure how the technology works underneath, but by watching the network usage on task manager, I see the network usage spikes only when a new track starts to play.
My only concerned with listening to music on the internet is that Orange broadband is already complaining about how much bandwidth Iâm using in the evenings (since I spend a lot of time watching mlb.com, iplayer, and youtube videos).
Iâve found some articles online that refer to Spotify as an iTunes-killer. I hardly think thatâs the case. If I was tied to this desk and never listened to music on my iPod in the car or while running, that would be the case, but you donât keep the music, you just listen. You can listen to albums or tracks and set up playlists.
Spotify is also being referred to as a legal alternative to piracy. I can see that.
Iâve only started using it a few days ago, but am very pleased with it. Iâm using the free account (ad-supported), but they have pro accounts for £10 a month. There are some adds inserted between the tracks, but Iâve listed by about 5 hours now and have only heard one.
Itâs a nice service available in the UK now if you have a chance to take it out.
Same as iPlayer et al. Spotify is a peer-to-peer distributed system, meaning it uses clients as servers: the music you download is cached, and sent on to other people listening to the same music.
It plays so fast because instead of complete files, Spotify uses small portions of music in a compressed format similar to (but far superior) to mp3. Each piece can de downloaded separately (from different peers, if need be), and only the first piece is required to kick of playing.
It does use a *lot* of bandwidth. Be wary if you by the gigabyte.
@Alex Thanks for the explanation Alex. I really like using the service, but I stopped short of joining the premium rate. For a while, I thought this could be like cloud computing with music– why should I spend so much on disk space if I can just rent it.
But, I get horrible broadband speeds in the evening here and I had a letter from Orange already about violating my fair usage policy for peak hours (like I’m supposed to be able to read the meter on how much goes out at which time). I think I’ll stick to iTunes for most music.