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Comment by revorad | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why they don't have a web app, especially when competitors like Last.fm, Grooveshark, Turntable.fm and others do.

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They probably don't have infrastructure for that yet and it also might be conscious decision. I've understood that the whole point of Spotify is that it is based on P2P-technology which eases their server load and allows good sound quality for users with fairly low connection speeds.

> and allows good sound quality for users with fairly low connection speeds.

P2P is all about lowering their costs, not about making better sound quality for low connection speeds. It doesn't matter if you're streaming from Spotify's data center or across the street, slow is as slow does. You're not squeezing more bits through a slow connection because of P2P.

I have been using this since early alpha and I have never had any slow issues. In fact it plays faster than iTunes

Great, but that's not because of any P2P elements but because your bandwidth is sufficient for a stream.

You are right, I didn't express myself quite clearly. But if you are in, say, Australia and you're streaming from a server that is in Sweden there is probably some bottleneck along the way that doesn't allow you to get full speed of your connection. But if you're streaming from across the street you probably get more use of your connection. Your connection speed is obviously the upper limit.

I don't know if I expressed myself any more clearly :)

Guess there could be some uses for a web app, but the desktop app is just so much better than any flash/html5 app. Haven't touched itunes after spotify.

The Windows version seems to wish it was iTunes.

Other than that, its quite responsive.

I use thesixtyone, earbits, grooveshark, last.fm in the browser and I have no trouble at all. The thing with music apps is that I just choose a playlist/station, hit play and forget. The UI doesn't even matter beyond that.

For a lot of people with that use-case the UI might not matter, but it is not the only use case for a streaming service. From http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/ one can see that almost 40% of tracks played are chosen actively as opposed to just continuing on to the next track.

You can't get the same level of service in a webapp. From technical papers on Spotify, one can see that they get an average of about 250ms to start playing a song, but still their own servers only need to stream about 20% or so IIRC of the total music played.

So the spotify client is doing P2P stuff completely skipping the servers? Why can't it be done in Javascript?

The client does P2P and local caching for offloading the servers. Apart from the technical issues in doing it browser side (for example, opening TCP connections), I seriously doubt that it could be done with the same level of efficiency.

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