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Business News Digital
Spotify says new version of desktop app deals with data dump bug
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 14 November 2016
Spotify has said that a new update of its desktop application that is currently being rolled out addresses a data dump issue with the previous iteration of the software.
The issue has been discussed on various message boards and was reported on by tech site Ars Technica last week. It seems the Spotify desktop app has been writing large amounts of ‘junk’ data to users’ hard disks, probably for months now.
Ars Technica wrote on Friday: “For almost five months – possibly longer – the Spotify music streaming app has been assaulting users’ storage devices with enough data to potentially take years off their expected lifespans. Reports of tens or in some cases hundreds of gigabytes being written in an hour aren’t uncommon, and occasionally the recorded amounts are measured in terabytes. The overload happens even when Spotify is idle and isn’t storing any songs locally”.
The article said that the site’s team had been able to replicate the problem on their own machines, while quoting one tech-savvy user of the streaming service as saying: “This is a major bug that currently affects thousands of users. If for example, Castrol Oil lowered your engine’s life expectancy by five to ten years, I imagine most users would want to know, and that fact should be reported on”.
Spotify subsequently stated that the latest version of its desktop app had dealt with the data dump issue, telling reporters: “We’ve seen some questions in our community around the amount of written data using the Spotify client on desktop. These have been reviewed and any potential concerns have now been addressed in version 1.0.42, currently rolling out to all users”. So, desktop Spotify streamers, that’s an update to welcome I’d say.
