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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

[cancels subscription]

I am not interested of using the official client that requires 2 gb of memory and is full of bloat.

The sad thing is Spotify used to have a really, really, really good native client.

Spotify have been continually reducing their offering since inception. This reminds me of when they stopped supporting Djay, a djay software where you could mix spotify tracks. It was genuinely a super useful bit of kit.

Instead their devs waste time on useless features and UI rewrites that they have to go back and re-add old features to and never seem to optimise for performance.

Right super sad, it was the best native client I have ever seen, and they trashed it so they could make the interface more dopaminergic.

DJay was incredible with that integration. It seems we are constantly regressing.

Yeah… the removal of Spotify from Djay made me go back to download music from torrents :(

Yeah the old Qt? client was great & snappy. It took quite some time to get basic features like cmd-f for the new client and it still does not support searching playlist by typing directly. Or at least didn't support year ago I still used Spotify.

I wonder if there are alternative clients based on the Rust library nowadays?

Plugging my ex-colleague's Spotify client called Psst[0] and built with Rust. Not as feature-full than the official client (yet) but way lighter and gets the job done.

[0] https://github.com/jpochyla/psst

Nice, bookmarked it.

For anyone on GNOME I'd recommend Spot

https://github.com/xou816/spot

I can recommend this as well. I've since moved away from Spotify, but I can definitely say that Psst is a better experience for my core Spotify use case: listening to albums from my favorite artists. When I used it it wasn't the best for discovery but it certainly worked.

I find that even using https://open.spotify.com in Safari is incredibly snappier and much less of a memory hog compared to the official client, at least on my own computer.

(I'm not at all trying to convince you to "stay", or even claiming that this solution is as good as a proper lightweight client. Also, I only ever use [free] Spotify to check my own music/page)

As everyone moves towards using Electron and Webviews for their native apps the apps just get worse than their web pages. Spotify, Discord, Slack, and many others are best off without the app. If 2010 was the decade of Smartphone apps I think 2020 will be the one where everyone returns to the web. The only thing really preventing this is Apple's obnoxious refusal to support web push notifications but that's eventually going to change.

I think this will be very good. The native app world will have much less corporate garbage and will be returned to the hackers at least to some degree.

I’m not sure, players like Reddit and Twitter seem dead set on purposely making their web experience as bad as possible to push people towards their app.

I use the linux client and it consumes like 300mb at worst. That being said I think that Spotify is the worst application I have ever used, it is like they hate the users.

It got worse a while ago, but it's quite fine again. Compared to the rest of music apps, it's a mile above.

Truth. This electron crap is really a disgrace to computing.

They should provide something like foobar2000

They used to

As a linux user electron has been a blessing. Before it, not many apps did support linux for obvious reasons but now most do.

Tbh, the election app is hardly better than using it in the browser. The browser version is better in some ways. It works on electron and now supports media keys.

I prefer Electron so that i can use it like a normal app.

If those fancy web page bookmark app things (i forget what they were called) had better support maybe they would work just as well, but generally i've had a better experience with Electron behaving like an App.

It costs me RAM, sure, but it exists. For Browser, if you prefer it.. use it, it's already there.

As the parent comment pointed out, if not for Electron i'd be missing probably 25% of my necessary apps. Net win for me, and browser options still exist for non-Electron folks.. seems a win to me.

I'll be interested to see Tauri (and similar tech) replace Electron, though.

I love PWAs on linux as well tho. I would rather install the PWA than use electron but if there is no choice, there is no choice :)

I use Tidal as a PWA for example and it works great.

Which OS? On my system (Windows 11) the official Spotify client occupies about 300 MB on RAM when just running songs from a playlist.

I'm sorry, am I the only one shocked when reading "300 MB of RAM" for a software which just plays music? mplayer uses a 6th of that to play videos.

Well there's more to the client than just playing music. As GP said there is bloat but to me some features are very useful.

A big part of the client is for browsing through music/album/playlists/artists. Of course you could search for music outside of Spotify but it's really convenient to have it integrated in the client. There's also a social media part (definitely bloat, I have disabled it) and more hidden features like being able to control the client from other Spotify clients (e.g. on my phone) which I use all the time.

300 MB is not great but it's low enough that I don't really care.

Using the API, is it possible to create an alternative app that is on par with Spotify itself? (That is, play music, playlists, shuffle, skip forward/back, er... not much else, maybe the home/discovery pages)

On iPhone, anyway, Spotify is much better than Apple Music.

Apple Music refuses to work at all on my iPhone, just won’t play anything at all.

I don’t even care enough to fix it, tbh. Will cancel it when the trial expires. Bummer as the spatial audio tracks do sound pretty badass on AirPods max :)

as I sit here at work my client (with hundreds of playlists and tens of thousands of downloaded songs) is using 200mb of memory? I wonder why the discrepancy

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