Thread: [ANNOUNCE] QSpot, a Qt-based Spotify client based on libspotify
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aenbacka is offline aenbacka
2010-12-14 , 08:36
Posts: 564 | Thanked: 693 times | Joined on Apr 2010
#368
Originally Posted by punto View Post
I kind of fell off using this as the official iPhone client is just much more... well, honestly, a quantum leap in terms of usability especially now with multitasking, and I don't get the connectivity issues (I quit when I couldn't load any of my playlists about three months ago). I've checked on the latest version though - nice work / improvements so far

The issues I've come up with so far are (all with wifi use):

- Stops playback after a while (i.e. before an album is completed). Not always but quite often. And no, I'm not logging on anywhere else.

- Grinds the phone down to almost a halt after it has been left without playback for a while (i.e. when the display goes back to sleep). I have to quit QSpot - which takes about a minute while I wait for the N900 to respond - in order to normalise the situation.

- High CPU use - drastically impacts battery

- Playlists often don't load, with a timeout error (I usually have around 80 playlists of individual albums). It's better than when I stopped using QSpot the last time where 9 times out of 10 playlists wouldn't load, but it's still like 3 times out of 10.

- Playback order is a bit off if you aren't using playlists - doesn't play by track but in a sorta-alphabetical order


Nice to haves as before:
- Offline
- Live playlist updates without needing to quit app
- Plus the stuff florian suggested
Thanks for your feedback, I have been trying to increase general stability of QSpot in the latest versions..

The sudden stop of playback is as already mentioned before in this thread related to libopenspotify, and I have not yet made any changes / fixes related to this problem. In many cases the playback is possible to manually resume (and this also happens more frequently on slower connections).

When you have experienced slowdown problems after using QSpot with the display off (sleep state), for approx. how long have you been playing, and e.g., using what bitrate? I have not myself noted such major slowdown problems; do you use e.g, swappolube or some other kernel parameter optimizations?

The high cpu usage is known, and it might be able to do some optimizations in that area; however handling of e.g., decompressing audio (ogg/vorbis) data by the library requires significant cpu (even more with higher bitrate).

I have also experienced problems with playlist loading now and then, and I think that one solution to this would be the introduction of offline playlist caching. E.g., as long as the playlists have not changed, they could be retrieved directly from the cache (this was already suggested by florian). Also the official Spotify clients retrieve playlist metadata from cache, and therefore they are often immediately available upon application startup.

When you refer to the playback order being a bit off, in what way would you prefer to have the tracks played? The search view currently offers several alternatives way to display / play the results.

The problem with offline mode is still the same; while it would be possible to implement from a technical point of view it will not be introduced in QSpot as this functionality can only be offered by the official Spotify clients (due to e.g, copyright etc. restrictions).

I will need to investigate whether live updates of playlist would be possible to implement.