With a weak Amlogic processor, 4GB of eMMC storage, and only 512MB of RAM, the device is too underpowered to run anything more demanding than its intended lightweight web-based media player.
Microcontroller hobbiests are over here salivating at those specs with the included screen and rotary controller
I’m just waiting for someone to integrate it into Home Assistant as a dashboard. Slim profile, tactile buttons, and a nice sized display would be a fantastic home dashboard screen.
I will accept no more increases personally…the second they announce it in my country, they are dead to me. Suck a fat one Spotify, you don’t even provide a good service
I pay for a premium plan so I can play the specific songs I want from Google in my house, but I’m ready for an alternative. It doesn’t allow you to block podcasts (generally or specifically) it’s a fucking battle to block any artist or song from showing up, and it is getting expensive.
Spotify does not know what I want to listen to better than I do, so stop recommending me joe mother fucking Rogan and country music because I liked one country song. Absolute trash fire.
I know Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to refer to a specific dynamic with social media, but what he described is really just a particular example of a more fundamental process that happens to virtually all notably successful companies. And this is a prime example of it.
In the beginning, the company gains success by offering a quality product that people want at a reasonable price. They actually provide a product or service the people want at terms with which they’ll agree, and thereby succeed, and that’s where the focus is.
But along the way, they pick up a layer of essentially parasitic executives and shareholders who are paid obscene amounts of money mostly just for having achieved their positions. They bring little if anything of value to the company - they just funnel enormous sums of money into their own and each other’s pockets.
And then the focus changes. It goes from winning customers through offering the best possible service or product at the best possible price to maximizing revenue with which to pay grotesquely inflated salaries and dividends to a relative few by offering the shittiest possible service or product at the highest possible price, and counting on market share, lack of competition, name recognition and inertia to keep the company going in spite of the fact that it’s now… enshittified.
And that’s what we’re seeing at Spotify right now.
This isn’t a “tech” issue. This is what happens without competition. Notice how in areas without many coffee shops, the few that exist get away with serving crappy coffee? But if there’s a lot of coffee shops the quality increases?
This is a fundamental part of economics. More choices result in better quality because of competition. Of course this relies on many things: being able to switch easily, customers understanding the product, etc. Literally every other industry wants to consolidate and avoid competition but it’s only possible in some of them.
I used Napster for the better part of a year. The app was horrible, the web player bad. It would be missing random albums, and some albums had missing songs. I finally went back to Spotify. But am once again looking for an alternative, hopefully one with business licensing so I can play it in my shop.
We really need a law for that. They should have to either
buy them back
make sure they work for a sufficiently long time after the last unit was sold (e.g. 5 years)
make the software open source so the community can maintain the software (if even possible, cause the community won’t be able to work on the server side)
release an offline patch that makes the device work even after servers have been shut down if that makes sense for the device in question (applies mostly to always-online single player games)
They need to give it a software update that essentially turns it into your average car entertainment system, with support for local files, AirPlay (and whatever the Android equivalent is… casting?), and other streaming services including Spotify (even the garbage free version), oh, and CDs too, with metadata. I mean, this thing is pretty good at modernizing older cars to an extent, why did they suddenly choose to get rid of it completely?
I’m pretty sure all it has is a USB-C port for power. But I think they can implement dongle support for things such as USB flash drives and CD drives. AirPlay (and its Android equivalent) can also be implemented since the device does indeed have Bluetooth.
Well I would like the option to use it as a simple media control. It only has 500 mb RAM so it’s not going to do well with a lot of local media playback
What a waste of resources. Millions of devices will now add to the landfill, despite nothing is wrong with them in terms of technical funtionality. Just because Spotify wants them do be discontinued.
It should be law that when a manufacturer decides on discontinuing an otherwise fully functional product in such way, they should be forced to publish the source code of the software used for the respective device as well as any other resources for free so that users of these devices at least have a chance to repurpose it.
This also stands for any “smart” / internet-of-things-devices where the main functionality is reliing on the operation of a server. When the servers discontinue their services your device is basically a brick with no other functionality.
Short answer is GPL3 doesn’t just require source disclosure for the software delivered but also software or firmware that it requires to function.
So say a network video player under GPL2 would require release of the player source code to whoever you give a copy of the player software to you wouldn’t have to give the source code to the video server that it needs to work with because you didn’t give them a copy of the server.
GLP3 would require you to also give the server code. So if the car thing was under GLP3 they would have to give the server code and people could run their own server for it.
That’s a simple explanation. In reality it’s more complicated but that’s the gist.
Some people prefer to use their car speakers over their phone speakers.
The device is designed to provide a nice and easy to use (when driving) touch interface for Spotify on old cars with only an aux port. Remember that few modern phones have 3,5 mm ports.
Have you seen those Bluetooth things that plug into the cigarette lighter? You can hook your phone up to older stereos with them. Pretty awesome and made my old truck better.
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