Extremely long loading times

[hahnbeelee]

Over the course of 2 days where I casually tried Jukebox out, I haven't been able to get the jukebox to play instantly.

The 2nd time I did leave the tab open and returned back several hours later and the song seems to have loaded in.

Curious what's causing it to take so long to load in - definitely think it needs to be looked at in order to be able to get that jukebox vibe for putting songs in and getting instant feedback/collab capabilities.

[skeptrunedev]

Over the course of 2 days where I casually tried Jukebox out, I haven't been able to get the jukebox to play instantly.

The 2nd time I did leave the tab open and returned back several hours later and the song seems to have loaded in.

Curious what's causing it to take so long to load in - definitely think it needs to be looked at in order to be able to get that jukebox vibe for putting songs in and getting instant feedback/collab capabilities.

When you add a song, the server first checks if it's already downloaded to S3 storage. If not, it queues a download task for background workers to handle. The entire song must be downloaded before it becomes playable, the client polls the server until it receives a playable URL.

I initially tried streaming songs directly as they downloaded, but this proved unreliable. YouTube's servers and proxies frequently fail mid-download, requiring retries and creating a poor user experience. Background downloading turned out to be much more stable.

The tradeoff should work well for playlist scenarios: while the first song always feels slow to load, subsequent tracks are typically cached by the time you need them. This creates a snappy experience for pre-created playlists, even though individual song requests feel sluggish initially.