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Comment by cift | Hacker News Reader

Something something electron bad

One of it's key features listed is 'Highly Efficient.'

I saw that too...How can something using Electron be highly efficient? Maybe they are talking about the interface and not the system resources the app uses.

Clementine doesn't use Electron and consumes more of my memory and UI is ugly. Before we start talking about resources maybe we should compare other music players on the market.

The observation that there's a music player resource tax just makes me less inclined to combine it with the Electron tax.

There isn't really one inherently; a music player like foobar2000 only takes a few MB of memory even with many plugins. That doesn't mean Clementine and Winamp haven't found ways to waste resources that aren't loading a full Chromium instance (after all, Chromium is pretty efficient considering what it actually brings to the table.)

Debian 10 + KDE, 46MB RSS + 10 MB shared memory consumed while playing some FLACs with lyrics tab opened.

Windows: private 90M, working set 111M. Mac: real mem 110 MB, around 10MB shared. Maybe Linux implementation deals better with memory.

As a matter of fact(but not scientifically accurate), chromium-based browsers were consuming twice as much RAM on Win than on Linux whenever I checked.

edit: missed a word

Both interface and performance actually. I have a library of about 1000+ songs and it barely takes anymore than 130 mb of RAM for me. This is actually better than some native c# music players that I used before I made this. And CPU usage is very light.

My how resource consumption expectations have changed.

This player: http://gqmpeg.sourceforge.net/mpeg-over.html

With a library of 5,011 songs.

Consumes 18 mb.

Since it uses the CLI mpg123 binary to actually play the songs, when playing the child mpg123 process uses up another 3 mb.

So take your pick, 18 mb or 21 mb. Much lower resource usage either way.

Other than shipping an entire browser? Lol

My current instance of Spotify is consuming 5.09 GB. (Not a typo.)

Certainly can't be any less efficient than that. Or can it..?

that's why I always use the web player, instead.

does the web player still sound atrocious (free Spotify). Last time i've checked it came with memories of 96Kbps mp3s.

High quality on the web player should be 256kbps AAC, so it should have no audible issues. That said, I find the web player absolutely horrible to use.

The desktop Electron app may be a bit of a pig, but on the other hand it runs on Windows, mac OS and Linux with very few issues, so I'll accept that trade-off.

I don't have Spotify premium - so the quality is 128 kbps.

The app works pretty fine, but is absolutely slow on my (old and quite underpowered) living room PC. But on the other hand it is just a media player...

The quality was the deciding factor for me to use the Spotify app.

How can you stand the ads and other limitations in the non-paid version?

I hardly use Spotify. I just use it if I don't want to buy a whole album or if I want to check out some new band. There is an ad every 3 or 4 songs - this seems pretty reasonable for me. I don't know of any other limitations. As much as I've read most of the limitations are for people on the mobile app (didn't like it at all) or when using playlists (I don't use play lists).

You do know you can skip those ads with a cheap VPN subscription, right ?

Or you can just pay for subscription, if you're going to pay for something anyway.

> Certainly can't be any less efficient than that. Or can it..?

Oh it can be. I get 100-110 mb at the most. I really don't think that you will be able to push it beyond 250 mb.

I think you may have misread his comment :)

> can't be any less efficient than that

"can't be more inefficient than that"

For me the combined processes of Spotify on macOS 10.13.4 (Activity Monitor → Memory + View → All Processes, Hierarchically) takes ~ 400Mb.

Virtual memory is close to 5 Gb, perhaps OP was looking at that.

Ah, thanks for the warning.

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