ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Mike Sheldon <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2013-10-25 at 19:27 +0200, Rasmus Eneman wrote:
>         >Having only a set of default services would be very limiting.
>         
>         >Even if a "music background service" could take streams to
>         support metronome-like apps, how about Spotify or Grooveshark?
>         
>         >They both have a lot of security built in and you can't just
>         take a stream and start playing, you have to talk with their
>         servers,
>         
>         >make sure you download the streams in correct speed (too fast
>         and they will think your downloading their music, too slow and
>         
>         >the listener will be sad) and have a lot of stuff setup just
>         for them to trust you.
>         
> >Download service?
> 
> 
> No, a music service with special support for Spotify, and Grooveshark,
> and Muzu and whatever music streaming service that are
> 
> out there that uses a special protocol that uses a lot of shatter to
> make sure you are using the data to play music and not download
> 
> it.

This is of particular interest to me at the moment, as I'm porting
MeeSpot (a MeeGo spotify client) to Ubuntu Touch (an early video of
which can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErscrflfQKI ).
libspotify basically requires you to handle little buffers of audio
frequently (sent either over the network or loaded from disk), so
couldn't be handed off to a generic music service.

Rewriting all the spotify communication and audio playback side as a
daemon would be possible, but would be something of a pain since it'd go
from being a fairly straight forward port of MeeSpot to a pretty major
refactor.

Rather than coming primarily from Android where such separations appear
to be the norm I'm coming from the Maemo/MeeGo/Mer/Sailfish world, where
all applications are given free reign to run in the background
completely as they see fit. As a developer this makes life much simpler
and as a user I've not come across much in the way of Maemo or MeeGo
applications that cause significant power drainage issues. 

So I'd caution against making life much harder for developers (and for
yourselves) over a perceived problem that may not be as large as you
anticipate. But as a developer I would say that ;).

Cheers,
 Mike.