Then why during there conferences they demo the Spotify app? I notice Google and MS do that too.
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Spotify Web Player No Longer Compatible With Apple's Safari Browser
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According to Spotify, the problem is now fixed, but what was happening was Spotify was writing a tremendous amount of data to the hard drive. Like tens of gigabytes an hour or more. At a sustained rate (the but was open for at least 5 months), this could theoretically reduce the lifecycle of an SSD as they are only rated to have so much data written to them.
Ars has a good explanation back in November. https://arstechnica.com/information...potify-has-badly-abused-users-storage-drives/
As I said, the issue has since been fixed (and I verified it as soon as it was reported because I’m an Apple Music and Spotify Premium subscriber — I prefer Apple Music on mobile and Spotify on the desktop), but it was definitely not great.
All said, I have always preferred the desktop app because of caching, iTunes and other music library integration, and offline access.
If you can live with the Spotify 10,000 track playlist limit, good for you. While I like a lot about Spotify, I find that limit to be as constraining as any "private garden", but admittedly I have only Apple devices. My personal library on Apple Music is about 40,000 tracks (I understand Apple's limit is way beyond that, but not sure what the total is) and counting.
The Mac Rumors community has pleasantly surprised me this morning. I was expecting a lot of conspiracy theories from both sides about either Apple crippling Spotify or Spotify trying to hurt Apple Safari use. Seems most people are taking it at face value that Widevine is not supported in Safari. There is hope!
Never too late for an inane conspiracy theory.
The Widevine plug-in for Safari hasn't been updated in over 3 years.
Safari no longer allows plugins like Widevine.
Safari supports EME, but doesn't support the loading of any Content Decryption Module except for Apple's own Fairplay system. That's not the system that Spotify use (which is Widevine). To be fair, Chrome is in exactly the same boat with not supporting anything but Widevine, but reach matters and Safari increasingly looks left behind on that front (looks at Facebook video chat).
Spotify may decide to support Fairplay at some point, but who knows.
Good to know. Having superficial knowledge of the EME API I was hoping these extensions could be implemented in the browser. Right now it actually makes sense for Spotify to use Widevine (if it's only supporting one), because it has the widest support.
According to MDN, Chrome, FireFox, and Opera support Widevine and ClearKey, Edge and IE support PlayReady, and Safari supports FairPlay.
Given the amount of distrust and contention EME itself created within the open source community I was really hoping it would not introduce incompatibilities like this .
From the article "Riegelstamm further dug into the details of the Web Player, discovering that the discontinuing of Safari support might have something to do with Google's Widevine media optimizer plugin, which Spotify requires for music streaming on the web and Apple opposes due to potential security issues."
Agreed. It will absolutely be a minority who would switch an entire streaming system rather than a browser for one website. People spend a long time setting up their playlists, offline music, syncing devices etc. Seriously can't think of a single person who would rather re-do all of that than just download Chrome.
Or, as is probably the case, just click on Chrome that they likely have installed already.
It's precisely because of the open source infighting that this happened - EME doesn't specify a mechanism for browsers to import a CDM one way or another because it would have caused such a bunfight, so in the end it was left up to browsers. In practice that means the browsers have focused on the CDM their parent company owns and ignored any means of touching the others, and everyone else has used Widevine because Google appear to be more willing to license it cost freely than Microsoft or Apple are.
In theory the PlayReady CDM is available to Windows 10 Modern apps I believe, but neither Chrome nor Firefox appear to be interested in going down that route.
No one is going to change from Spotify because it dropped support for Safari. Apple pulls the same nonsense. You had to use Safari or Microsoft Edge to watch their live stream.
I'm beginning to wonder if this is deliberate on Apple's part since the same thing happens now with SiriusXM web player in Safari. Reported this to Apple using beta feedback a few High Sierra betas ago but nothing. Maybe Apple doesn't want any other web music player working in Safari?
I don't particularly care to have to open another browser just to play SiriusXM on my MB Pro.
Just checked and Pandora still works in Safari. Interesting!
Paid music streaming service that supported the browser before.
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Apple event that is broadcasted a few times a year to advertise new products.
I guess since you have said no one is going to change from Spotify then nobody will, great that you’ve cleared it up for us all.
Can't get the SiriusXM "Listen Live" to work with MacOS 10.13 - works fine with Firefox. Loaded new Flash plugin to no avail. The songs "change" but NO SOUND.
Spotify still haven't solved this issue by using the WebCrypto API like Netflix.
For anyone not up to date on this issue. The problem is entirely caused by a change on Spotify's end. Spotify previously used Flash for their Safari Player. When they stopped supporting Flash they neglected to offer an alternative for Safari users. Other browsers use Widevine, which Apple won't support because of security reasons and also because it's proprietary. Apple prefers to support WebCrypto API which is a universal open standard.
For anyone not up to date on this issue. The problem is entirely caused by a change on Spotify's end. Spotify previously used Flash for their Safari Player. When they stopped supporting Flash they neglected to offer an alternative for Safari users. Other browsers use Widevine, which Apple won't support because of security reasons and also because it's proprietary. Apple prefers to support WebCrypto API which is a universal open standard.
The WebCrypto API isn't any use on it's own. Netflix use the EME API to call Fairplay Streaming in the video player in Safari. That's not supported in Safari for audio only (and wouldn't really be in line with the W3C spec if it was, though Chrome does allow similar with Widevine).