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Is there any built-in way to know in windows 7 where the spotify application connects to?

I'd like to know if it connects to the local (the same country) server, or some abroad one.

Yes, I could install some personal firewall like Comodo or Outpost or something else, but for this task I see that as an overkill.

Any ideas with built-in tools or something really lightweight?

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

You can do this at a command prompt to find out:

netstat -b

If you don't feel like looking through the output, open powershell instead then:

netstat -b -n | Select-String 'spotify' -context 1

Here is the powershell oneliner with it doing a reverse DNS lookup on the IP for you:

netstat -b -n | Select-String 'spotify' -context 1 | %{$ip=($_.context.precontext -split '\s+')[3].split(':')[0]; $nethost= [System.Net.Dns]::GetHostbyAddress($ip).HostName; "$ip = $nethost"}
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Yeah, but its output (with additional -n) contains all the connections and it will be a bit painful to look through what connection is used by a particular app. (+1 though) – zerkms Oct 10 '12 at 20:19
Oh, I need glasses - right, netstat contains the application name. So it's trivial now, thanks – zerkms Oct 10 '12 at 20:23
up vote 1 down vote

Spotify connects to many nodes in a peer-to-peer network, some will be close to you, other far away.

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And who does host those peers? Are they all spotify's servers? – zerkms Oct 10 '12 at 20:19
+ "The contents of each client's cache is summarized in an index which is sent to the Spotify stream hub upon connecting to the service. This index is then used to inform other clients about additional peers they can connect to for fetching streamed data for individual tracks being played. This is accommodated by each client, upon startup, acting as a server listening for incoming connections from other Spotify users, as well as connecting to other users to exchange cached data as appropriate. There are currently no official details from the developers ..." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify – zerkms Oct 10 '12 at 20:25
thank you very much for your answer. It makes a lot of sense but I only can check one :-( – zerkms Oct 10 '12 at 20:28

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