Spotify for Linux! :D

I barely remember signing up for a "Spotify-for-Linux" campaign on the Spotify-forums a while ago (you can find the forums here). But now, a few months later, the Spotify-crew apparently used their spare time since the campaign launched to engineer a native linux-client :) way to go guy's!

At the beginning of this week, the Spotify RSS-feed announced the tech-preview of the Spotify-for-Linux-client. Being the technophiliac that I am, I just couldn't resist testing it, even though I had promised myself I wouldn't test any beta-software on my only surviving laptop from the last decade (Asus Eee 900).

After crashing the client on the command-line before even logging in or anything, I got really frustrated. It felt like an eternity ago I signed that petition for a linux-client, so I didn't stop now.

So, I figured I'd report the problem in their forums. I posted under the title "Spotify for Linux - UNE 10.04.1 - Illegal instruction". The problem was acknowledged a day later, and a few days after that (today) they released an updated package that didn't throw an exception because of instruction-sets (low-level CPU functions).

At this very moment, I am listening to my playlists in the native linux-client :D and I'm VERY pleased! INDEED! ;D

You can find out more at this address:
http://www.spotify.com/en/download/previews/

P.S.you have to own a paid premium-account to use the linux-client for now, they're having issues on how to display ads in a stable manner (read: without being "hackable" :P). So, until they solve the ad-problems, only premium-users can use the client.

Additional, July 17th 03:39 GMT+1:

After using the preview-client for a day or two, I'm very pleased with the sound quality and player operation, especially considering it's an alpha/beta-stage project.

Sure, there are hickups in the code as with many other linux-based projects, but overall it's very operational, functional, and mostly stable. Using unimplemented-features shoots the cpu-load through the roof (60-80%), but that's to be expected, infancy-bugs will be debugged eventually.