Spotify

Posted on Tue 10 November 2009 by alex in general

I was all set to fire up the free Spotify client listen to one of the suggested albums from a previous post. I was ready to accept the rather grating adverts every few tracks when I noticed the people at Spotify over a 0.99p day pass which I duly signed up to.

Getting the client to work on my office machine proved to be a little more of a challenge as running through Wine it seemed to be having issues playing sound. My work machine is on the current Ubuntu LTS so getting a little long in the tooth but I eventually found the "padsp" emulation function that allows programs to think they are talking to an OSS sound device while using the new schizzle that is PulseAudio. For reference the correct solution to running is:

padsp wine spotify.exe

The Spotify experience is different from that of last.fm offering as it does complete control of the playlist. However if I really want the music I will most likely buy the music and add it to my various distributed digital devices. Having said that I can certainly see me paying for a day pass every now and again to listen to albums before I buy them. So any releases from the last year I should be listening to on today's pass?