How to reduce the hard drive space Spotify uses

January 18th, 2012 | Posted by Brian in Tech/Web - (0 Comments)

Spotify uses too much hard drive storage space. They cache most of your songs, and use upwards of 1gb of drive space. They do this only to reduce bandwidth to their servers. If you have an enormous hard drive, this isn’t as big of a deal (though I still don’t like when programs use more resources than they need to).

But if you have an ultrafast SSD (such as the 60gb one I have), then hard drive space is once again at a premium. The following simple steps will allow you to limit the space Spotify uses, freeing back up your disk space, while still allowing Spotify to work just fine.

STEP 1: Eliminate the current cache

Open windows explorer and navigate to:
C:\Users\[computer username]\AppData\Local\Spotify\Storage

… replacing [computer username] with the name you are logged into Windows with. Note: you may have to first set explorer to display hidden files to see all the files.

Delete all the folders / files in this directory.

STEP 2: Manually edit the settings file

Since Spotify’s preferences only allow you to set the minimum storage space at 1 gb (i.e. 1024 mb), you’ll have to manually edit the settings file to set it lower. I’d recommend no lower than 20 mb, in order that at least the current song you’re listening to and a couple more can be cached. I’m using a value of 50.

Once again in windows explorer, go to:
C:\Users\[computer username]\AppData\Roaming\Spotify

Open the file “settings” in Notepad. Find the phrase “cache_size”, and change the value following it to your desired size. Example:    “cache_size”:1024   ** changed to **   “cache_size”:50

Notes:

These instructions are for windows 7. Another OS should only differ in where these files are located.

As with anytime you are editing files, backup the original files first (e.g. copy and rename to “settings.old”).

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s3slider is not a function – Troubleshooting s3Slider Errors

January 10th, 2012 | Posted by i.nconspicuo.us in Random Stuff - (0 Comments)

I was recently updating a site that was using the s3Slider jQuery library, when I noticed it had stopped working, and I was constantly receiving the javascript error: s3slider is not a function

Upon doing a little research, I realized that this was a fairly common problem that quite a few people had run into, however, my solution was not the same as all the solutions that I found. One solution that I found online was to not use the minified version of s3slider. The minified version of s3slider apparently contains some errors, so using the default version will oftentimes solve whatever error you’re receiving. If this solution doesn’t work for you, you may have the same problem I was having. My problem stemmed from where s3slider was being loaded on the page. It was being loaded before the jQuery library was being loaded. By updating my HTML to load jQuery first, I was able to resolve the issue.

s3slider is not a function in my case was the error being caused by the jQuery library not being initialized first. Easy fix, by just moving the s3slider.js file above the jquery declaration.