{"id":6,"date":"2012-06-05T21:33:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-05T20:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bennish.net\/blog\/?p=6"},"modified":"2021-05-11T09:51:11","modified_gmt":"2021-05-11T08:51:11","slug":"spotify-vs-deezer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bennish.net\/blog\/2012\/06\/spotify-vs-deezer\/","title":{"rendered":"Spotify vs Deezer"},"content":{"rendered":"
This is an old blog post from 2012 and a lot has changed since then.\u00a0 If you are trying to decide what music streaming service to use, maybe check out Best Music Streaming Services Based on In-Depth Reviews<\/a>.<\/em><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/div>\n
It seems that if you want a music streaming service, the main contenders available in the UK are Spotify and Deezer, with Spotify being the more famous of the two.\u00a0 I recently came back to Spotify Premium after about half a year with a Deezer subscription.\u00a0 So I feel I’m in quite a good position to give a comparison between the two services.\u00a0 Why did I move from Spotify to Deezer in the first place?\u00a0 Why have I come back to Spotify?\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Shedding the Spots<\/h2>\n

The main reason I moved away from Spotify was because I discovered that it uses P2P (peer-to-peer) technology and that there is no option to disable this.\u00a0 This means that whenever the Spotify program is open, it will happily upload lots of music data that you happen to have on your hard drive (perhaps because it’s cached or because it’s in an “available offline” playlist) to other Spotify users.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This poses a number of problems.\u00a0 Firstly, those with a limited amount of bandwidth provided by their ISP may find that Spotify uses up a lot of their allowance.\u00a0 Secondly, when uploading to other users, it can cause problems for other applications that use your Internet connection.\u00a0 In particular, online gamers (such as myself) will find their ping\/latency in games reach unacceptable levels.<\/p>\n

I had been slightly grumpy with Spotify for a while (due to posting a number of issues \/ recommendations on their support forum and not getting any official responses.)\u00a0 At the time I was also using a 1st generation iPhone (‘2G’) and Spotify had recently decided (without warning) to remove support for these iPhones from their mobile app.<\/p>\n

So I couldn’t really have Spotify open (and therefore listen to music) at the same time as playing Guild Wars and I could no longer listen to Spotify on the move. I decided to look elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Becoming a Deezer Geezer<\/h2>\n

Deezer seemed to fit the bill nicely.\u00a0 Not only do they offer a free month’s trial (I didn’t even have to enter my credit card details if I remember correctly), it works from within the web browser (so it definitely doesn’t use P2P) and has a large collection of music.\u00a0 Plus their app worked on iOS 3 and so I could listen to music on my mobile again.<\/p>\n

All well and good but after a few months I noticed a number of problems.\u00a0 Because Deezer works within the web browser, this introduces a number of limitations.\u00a0 Firstly, any multimedia keys you have on your keyboard (‘play\/pause’, ‘next track’, etc) will not function.\u00a0 Secondly, it cannot play any local music tracks (e.g. mp3s) that you have on your computer without you uploading them first.\u00a0 And once uploaded, the way u navigate them is rather clumsy – it wouldn’t even let me sort them by or even list their track numbers.\u00a0 Thirdly, the only way to add an album to a playlist in Deezer is to add each track in turn.\u00a0 This may not sound like much of a problem but it can get pretty irritating pretty quickly.\u00a0 Lastly I found that Deezer didn’t have music from a number of artists that I really like that Spotify does have; Hybrid, Plaid and Autechre, for example.\u00a0 By this point I had ditched the iPhone and got a fantastic Samsung Galaxy SII which Spotify supported so I chose to return to Spotify.<\/p>\n

Re-Spotification<\/h2>\n

Spotify have recently implemented ‘gapless playback’, a feature that many users had been requesting for ages.\u00a0 When listening to an album where one track is supposed to mix seemlessly into another, this feature really improves the experience for me.<\/p>\n

But what about the P2P problem?\u00a0 I still played Guild Wars and I still wanted to listen to music whilst playing without it uploading lots of data to others and giving making my character the response time of a drunken tortoise.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Spotify still<\/b> provide no option for disabling the P2P part of the program so I had to resort to more technical measures.<\/p>\n

At first I thought I would have to enable ‘offline mode’ whenever I was playing an online game.\u00a0 However, this would prevent me streaming any music (that wasn’t “available offline”.)\u00a0 What I did was to use the Windows Firewall built into Windows 7 and configure it such that incoming connections to Spotify were refused except for IP addresses on the local subnet (i.e. other computers\/devices on my home network.)\u00a0 If you want to know more details about how to do this, please leave a comment and if there is enough demand I will explain in a seperate blog post.<\/p>\n

So now I’m back with Spotify, minus the annoying P2P and with a supported mobile phone!\u00a0 Hooray!<\/p>\n

Summary of the advantages<\/h2>\n

Spotify<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  • Larger music collection<\/li>\n
  • Gapless playback<\/li>\n
  • Multimedia keyboard keys work properly<\/li>\n
  • Better support for playback of local music files<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Deezer<\/span><\/p>\n

      \n
    • Works within any Flash-enabled web browser therefore more ‘portable’<\/li>\n
    • No peer-to-peer (P2P)<\/li>\n
    • Support for the original (‘2G’) iPhone<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

      <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      This is an old blog post from 2012 and a lot has changed since then.\u00a0 If you are trying to decide what music streaming service to use, maybe check out Best Music Streaming Services Based on In-Depth Reviews. \u00a0 It seems that if you want a music streaming service, the main contenders available in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"templates\/template-full-width.php","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,11],"tags":[22,23,21],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bennish.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bennish.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bennish.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bennish.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bennish.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bennish.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236,"href":"https:\/\/www.bennish.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bennish.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bennish.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bennish.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}