Tag: Spotify

I bought Serengeti‘s album Standing Steady on MP3 from Bengans and wanted to play it in Spotify as “Local Files”. It worked perfectly in MS Windows, but on Ubuntu I got “File is an unsupported format”. WTF?

Spotify acknowledges this:

Spotify uses the system-supplied MP3 decoder on all platforms, and during our limited testing we found the Wine decoder to be excessively unstable on quite a few MP3 files, including some from our purchase partners. We are therefore blocking codecs with the identifier “WINE-MPEG3″ until the Wine system works satisfactorily.

One workaround I found involved recompiling or binary-patching WINE. Not so fun.

The official support forum contained a solution based around installing Windows Media Player 10. I have downloaded and installed it now according to the instructions, but already the playback froze once. Well, Spotify isn’t perfectly reliable in WINE anyway, so this is probably Good Enough.

For various reasons (see bottom of WinePulse – PulseAudio for Wine) the main branch of Wine does not support PulseAudio. This makes Spotify under Wine misbehave a bit, but fortunately there is a solution! A person called Neil Wilson has been kind enough to provide PPA packages of Wine with the WinePulse patch. I’m installning this PPA on all my Ubuntu machines where me of my wife use Spotify.