Spotify lands on Linux

 

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 12 Jul 2010 at 14:08

Streaming music service Spotify has announced a preview version of its software for Linux users, who had previously been left out of the loop.

According to Spotify, the preview is a fully-featured version of the popular online music service, but remains a work in progress, with local music files not supported.

“It shares most of the same features as our Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications,” Spotify said in a blog post. “Unfortunately, there are issues regarding decoding of local music on the Linux platform so we haven’t included support for local files in this version.”

Although the Linux version is currently unsupported as a mainstream product, Spotify's in-house developers will keep working on it.

One obvious next step would a reliable advertising platform as Spotify has so far been unable to display ads on Linux, an omission that means the service is currently only available to Spotify Premium subscribers.

Linux fans wanting to try out the first release - a Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 10.04 package – can find details here.