Spotify might be killing SSDs by design errors? | Hacker News Reader

Spotify might be killing SSDs by design errors?

community.spotify.com

102 pointsmciancia29 comments

Spotify does not care and will not fix this unless there is a major outcry. They've been ignoring user complaints since "1.0" dropped quite a while ago. They don't even post changelogs anymore. Features are added one day and disappear the next. It took months for them to reintroduce CTRL-F. They don't care.

If another platform had the cross-device operability and catalog, I'd switch immediately.

Deezer maybe ? Never used spotify but i'm kinda happy with deezer at the moment.

Pandora is said to be working on a competing service to launch next year. They bought what was left of rdio, so I'm expecting the client won't be as generally bad as Spotify's.

Pandora's radio is already superior to Spotify's. I'd jump all over that if it happened.

I'm planning to do the same, I have a hard time imagining that it could be worse.

http://www.pressherald.com/2016/09/13/pandora-to-launch-%E2%...

how's tidal?

They probably won't even fix it if there is an outcry. Their software is pretty bad. Back when I had an android phone (galaxy S5), their app would constantly crash on me multiple times per day.

Unfortunately their competition is not so great. Apple music has the worst UX I have ever experienced. I tried google music when it first came out but I liked spotify's catalog and ability to share playlists better at the time. And finally, there is Tidal which I haven't tried but I have heard it's not that good.

4 big competing streaming services and they all have glaring issues/missing features and yet seem to not be doing anything about it...

Windows Phone had Nokia MixRadio, and it was great. And then MS killed it.

ex-mixradio guy here, MS didnt kill it really - they "sold" is to Line Corporation which eventually killed us ..

I've been using Google Play Music since it launched, and I'm very happy with the service. It works very well on web/Android/iOS, and there's rarely anything that I find missing from its catalog. And, for the rare times that I do, Google Play Music comes with YouTube Red, which gives you ad-free playback and offline caching.

Apple Music is decent, Google Play is probably more worthwhile

After seeing this post today I made a script to install a Electron wrapper for the Spotify web client so that you can still have the "dedicated desktop app" feel/behavior without the SSD-killing part! https://jamesmcintyre.github.io/spotify-electron-client/

How can I enable flash in electron to make it work?

I'm a heavy Spotify user and my Intel 330 SSD just died catastrophically and I am just about to install a brand new Samsung Evo today. This is definitely concerning, especially the lack of communication from Spotify on the matter.

Who is the CTO and what does he say about it so far?

Without a qualified representative making a statement, it simply looks like a case of either poor engineering or pith-poor engineering, difficult to be sure which.

Definitely the type of defect that needs to be corrected in soft-wares before they can actually become worth money.

For funsies, I just started Spotify, and closed the window. Nothing playing, no user interaction, no UI to draw.

25 minutes later, and Activity Monitor reports it's written 1.05 GB to disk.

This is probably related to the bittorrent client included in Spotify https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-a-massive-p2p-network-bless...

I just checked and it is insane, for a 4 minutes long song the Spotify windows app made 163.165 writes to the mercury.db-wal file.

http://imgur.com/a/rDhPS

constantly updating the sqlite temp file.

If I recall correctly, there was a similar issue with Firefox.

Is this just a guess or did you investigate?

I used perfmon and procmon and saw the Spotify process was writing to a file in my temp folder named etilqs_{random string}. The first part of the name is SQLite in reverse. This was on Windows. I also noticed three other etilqs files but they were owned by the Google Chrome process.

Anyone know if this occurs on the Mac client?

On Mac, 13GB Written by Spotify in the last 4 hours as reported by Activity Monitor. I only listened to 10-20 songs.

I've been listening for a few hours now, just checked AM and saw 44GB on disk, but oddly for Network, it has only received 176MB. Where is all the data coming from then?

My spotify is showing 168.23 GB written and 1.45GB read. Meanwhile, chrome has only written 51.27 GB and read 6.03 GB. This is also on my home computer where I rarely listen to music (usually I listen on my work computer or phone).

Maybe it is time to charge companies for resources they use to run their apps.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...

No.

Even if that was a hard rule, the headline has been altered. Original headline is "Spotify killing my SSD"

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