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Comment by jimvdv | Hacker News Reader

I once found 15gb+ of Spotify cache from my 256gb MacBook. Deleted the app and use the web player now.

The cache is there for your benefit (and theirs too), so that you don't have to constantly re-download the same song over and over, which matters to some people that have bandwidth restrictions. There's a button in their settings that lets you clear it with ease

It doesn’t benefit me much as I have unlimited bandwidth and I can download an entire song in 10 seconds so don’t have any buffering.

I can see how it saves Spotify some bandwidth costs.

But I hate big caches as I don’t really think about them until my disk is full and I need to do something.

I wish programs would be better stewards of user resources.

I’ve had my music cached locally since the 90s.

People ask why everything is web apps and there's the answer - It's a layer of sandboxing that users have _at least some_ control over.

Teams web version has local storage of 2gb.

The problem is developers don’t know what the hell they’re doing

The problem is devs have beefy computers with 2TB SSDs.

In music, producers would listen to their mix on different audio systems, including crappy radios.

Not just the producers, but musicians often do this as well (the good ones anyway!)

I feel like I'd have a better chance clearing the cache for the app than the cache for the web app.

It's a few clicks in any browsers dev tools or a few more clicks in the settings, and is the same for every website.

With a native app the cache could be in any number of places on your hard drive, you have to depend on a function being in the app to clear it, deleting it manually might have unknown side effects, and it's all nonstandard.

Websites can’t write to arbitrary places on your FS and the browser has a central way to delete the data that a website can write.

Desktop apps can write anywhere, and what it writes might or might not be a cache, so there’s no way to centrally manage it. Apps like cache-cleaners simply hard-code common cache paths for common apps.

Eh? People have some control over native apps too. It’s just a trade-off of what you want to control. I like how I can control the time I spend in my workflow just because native apps are faster and more battery-efficient, and don’t override OS gestures and mouse events within their own windows.

The problem with the web player is that the volume normalization feature is missing.

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