After two days with a free account, on a Mac, I noticed this:
- If you mute your speakers via OS X while an advertisement is playing, it pauses the ad until you unmute your speakers.
- If you turn down your speaker volume via OS X too much while an advertisement is playing, the same behavior occurs until you turn the volume back up. This appears to be relative to the volume you were just listening to music at.
Quick fix around this; use headphones. Just take them off to ignore an ad. Or if you have a separate sound system, mute that. Annoying if you have a laptop though. This behavior doesn't occur when music is playing.
Free version is quite unlistenable these days though. I'm a spoiled Swede though. I started using the service years ago when it was still based on the Spotify employees pirated music collection (with occasional release group names in the metadata).
If they wanted to be especially clever, when you muted/turned down the volume while a song was playing they would continue to advance the progress bar while not actually streaming the song, which might save them some royalty costs.
When I was using the free version a while back you could mute and then hit play again if you didn't want to listen to the ads. Don't know if that still works.
- If you mute your speakers via OS X while an advertisement is playing, it pauses the ad until you unmute your speakers.
- If you turn down your speaker volume via OS X too much while an advertisement is playing, the same behavior occurs until you turn the volume back up. This appears to be relative to the volume you were just listening to music at.
Quick fix around this; use headphones. Just take them off to ignore an ad. Or if you have a separate sound system, mute that. Annoying if you have a laptop though. This behavior doesn't occur when music is playing.