Soundcloud kills my CPU cores
Hugo over at everydaylistening.com posted this interesting article praising music service website soundcloud.com.
I also noticed more and more artists are using this service.
Last night, while trying to play one of the artists sets featured in soundcloud i noticed my CPU cores were maxxing out at 99%. So, i closed everything, rebooted my computer and made sure i was only running one IE 6 window and soundcloud. Lo and behold.. soundcloud was killing my CPU cores again. Keep in mind, my computer is no slouch, my hardware consists of 2gb RAM with a Dual Core AMD Athlon CPU, running Windows XP SP2.
I went as far as trying Soundcloud on a different computer (with even more powerful Dual Core CPUs) using Opera 9.25 and I couldn’t even play the files. I tried soundcloud + IE 6 on the same different computer and soundcloud almost froze Windows XP after it maxxed out both CPU cores.
Sorry but it is inexcusable that an web app will max out two CPU cores to play a simple MP3 file. There is no reason why i should have to update IE just to play MP3s on soundcloud’s website. I already have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed.
Whatever happened to testing web apps with different browsers?
That is the big problem with the so-called, cloud computing: You are totally dependent on whatever dubious programming the delivery website does at their end. It is no wonder Richard Stallman thinks cloud computing sucks.
Sure, cloud computing services have their place, but it is not the panacea most people make it out to be. Cloud computing is the new fad among CIOs and their like, just like the network computer was a fad few years ago.
Just like I wrote in the comments section of the everydaylistening.com article, artists should never depend on just one delivery method and should try to host their own stuff if possible, instead of relying on someone else’s bad technology.
For those who aren’t old enough to remember, look up the MP3.com story when the company went belly-up and all the artist mp3 content got “lost.” Why trust your music to a company who may not be around in a few months? Why trust your music to a company that can’t even properly test their software with different browsers?
If you think your music is worth listening to, you should invest the time and learn how to use some simple open source software tools to build and host your own website and music files.
2 Responses to “Soundcloud kills my CPU cores”
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Hey, I’m sorry to hear SoundCloud is causing you trouble. My little review of course was only based on my personal experience using SoundCloud on my Mac, in Safari and Firefox. I hope they’ll fix this problem asap.
Hi Hugo
Don’t worry, it’s not your fault!
let’s hope the people at soundcloud start doing some web browser testing for their own sake!