Do we know it’s Christmas?

Martin turned out to be brilliant at decorating the Christmas tree, Rasmus at baking good looking gingerbread cookies, Roberta at playing old school Christmas carols, Daniel at lightening all the sparkling candles, Jon at teaching us the proper Christmas tree dance, Mattias at being our Santa and all of us at drinking spicy glögg and eating juicy saffron rolls.

With this dream team working as if there was no tomorrow, we know it’s Christmas time, and we’re well prepared. Now when we’re in the right mood we would like to share it with you guys! We hope you all are feeling well and are in good cheer with a warm Christmasy feeling. If you’re not, stop by our office – here it’s Christmas time for sure!

From all of us to all of you:

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

All the Best from Sophia and the Spotify Team

I recommend this reggae-themed Christmas playlist from my friend Nome at Remotion. It goes very well with a homemade mumma and gingerbread dough.

This is what Ullemon wishes for Christmas. Here’s what we’re dreaming of…

Max: “I would like a slide caliper, disc sander and a bobcat”
Magnus: “I’m dreaming of a new roof, a blueberry pie, a pony and a house at the French Riviera”
Emil: “I need a cool reflector shaped as a lion”
Per: “More cowbell!”
Mattias: “A mini helicopter to play around with at home”
Sophia: “A Jane costume and a pair of new boots”
Göran: “Peace on earth and kind & happy people”
Martin B: “A Nokia N810″
Petra: “One week at a spa”
Jon: “I need a new alarm clock, preferably one of those simulating dawn light”
Andreas: “A coat hanger”
Daniel: “New china”

We released a new version of Spotify today. We have mostly fixed bugs, but some of the changes are things you may notice.

On the Mac:

• The artist view has had a lot of changes under the hood. A lot of small issues have been fixed and the entire view should be faster over all.
• Spotify displays an error message if you try to open invalid URIs.
• You can drag cover art images.
• Spotify uses the sRGB color space. This means that the player looks a bit darker than before.
• When viewing the biography an artist image (if available) is shown even if the biography text is very short.
• Spotify avoids saving passwords if password saving is disabled.
• Rows in the artist view are no longer selected when cover art images are clicked (or right-clicked).

On Windows:

• Spotify cleans up state on uninstall and informs the user if Spotify
  is still running.

Common to both platforms:

• You can drag and drop the currently playing track, as shown above the position indicator at the bottom of the Spotify window, or right-click it to bring up a context menu.
• The login window (again) shows a message when Spotify is upgraded.
• Spotify no longer skips the first track of a playlist when it is selected as the current playlist.

We are also happy to announce that Spotify runs better than ever under Wine. Most of the graphical glitches have been removed and the menus respond better to clicks.

It’s boring to read about songs when you can’t hear them. So when I read Allmusic Editors Pick Their Top Ten of 2007, I just had to create AMG Top tens of 2007 Spotified

And the opposite is even more true: It’s really fun to hear songs while you read about them!

Thank you, Allmusic for a great list!

Friends are crucial and we’ve got a bunch of great friends who we invited to our Christmas party. It was very kind of them to help us with the beer we needed to get out of the server room to fit more servers.

Thank you guys for all the nice presents we got: Shrek ears, flowers and helicopters, what more could one wish for? Thank you, Mumsan and Johan for boosting our creative corner!

Thank you Frida, David, Amit and all of our friends at Radon for the great feedback wall in the conference room! We’ve got friends who are so ambitious and smart that they can’t stop working even when we invite them to a party!

Filip Göransson, we found your wallet. Carl Waldencrantz left us some huge tennis shoes, and we’ve got David’s (of Radon) cute red iPod. No worries, everything is OK and you can drop by here at any time to pick your stuff up.

And thank you, Max, for an excellent eleven-hours DJ session! My feet are still sore.

Share. As kids we’re taught to share our toys and play nice with others. We share secrets, memories, ideas, fears, dreams and favorite songs. These are all things that matter and it feels good to share them with our loved ones.

Remember your first mixtape? I do.

There is nothing like the first mixtape you got from that special someone. Behind it lies a symphony of thoughts, hours and love that always seem to make up for the messy writing on the cover.

We just love the idea of sharing a well composed group of songs, so as a tribute to the mixtape we’ve created sharable playlists in our most recent update: Spotify 0.2.2. Just drag and drop a playlist (or right-click and copy the link) and send it to your special someone via email or IM.

BTW, don’t forget that the playlists you’ve decided to share will be updated instantly when you add, remove or reorder songs. Might be good to think of before adding I’m Leaving You Because I Don’t Love You.

We have published a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) for our beta testers. In case there is something you want to know, please check the FAQ first!

If you’re experiencing problems with Spotify or want to send us feedback, you can select Give Feedback… from the Help menu and use the built-in interface for that. You can also check out our guidelines for submitting bug reports, crash dumps and screenshots.

Unfortunately we currently have some issues with a disk server, which caused Spotify to be unavailable this morning. At this stage in the beta test our production system is not as redundant as we would like it to be, and if things get worse, that might lead to some more downtime.

We’re doing everything we can to prevent that, but please bear with us, in case something happens. Sorry about the inconvenience!