Qobuz - A lovely Symfony musical score
Learn how music streaming platform Qobuz used Symfony to build a powerful, robust application supporting high streaming volumes.
The Project
Qobuz chose the Symfony framework for the development of its online music platform. The reliability of the framework, coupled with SensioLabs support throughout the development phase, has allowed Qobuz.com to offer its users extra high-quality musical, editorial and functional services. As the only site today offering a catalog of quite literally millions of available tracks in "true CD quality sound", Qobuz.com has become one of the major actors in online music in France and around the world.
Primary benefits:
Professionalization of PHP development
Functional gains in agility
Doctrine integration
Easy start-up with Symfony, thanks to intense technical support and the accompaniment of SensioLabs teams during development
The Stakes
Qobuz.com is an online music service platform whose purpose is to propose both musical and high-quality editorial content. Qobuz.com positions itself on the market as a real online record store offering its subscribers millions of titles encoded in a "lossless" format (also known as "true CD quality sound") unlike its direct competitors, who offer only compressed formats with loss and thousands of articles and recommendations.
It was essential for Qobuz to develop a sufficiently powerful and robust technical platform to meet the constraints and address necessary issues as required by their unique positioning. Their primary goal was to guarantee customers the level of expected service with a framework capable of supporting heavy streaming levels.
Symfony satisfied all of our professional development needs! We gained functional agility and were finally able to concentrate on our real focus: music.
Rabye Marouene, CIO, Engineering and Development at Qobuz.com
The Solution
Initial contact with the SensioLabs teams in 2008 convinced Qobuz to choose the Symfony framework in version 1.4. “We were looking for a professional development framework,” remembers Rabye Marouene, CIO, Engineering and Development at Qobuz. “We developed a first application in Symfony to get a feel for the framework, and that was enough to convince us.” Combining Doctrine and Symfony facilitates the reading and the persistence of the information in a database, an undeniable asset to this project.
During the development phase, Qobuz teams benefited fully from the expertise of SensioLabs teams: architecture design, technical assistance, training, XHTML and CSS integration in post-design... “I think we have used ALL of SensioLabs services!” jokes Rabye Marouene.
The result of this fruitful collaboration: a site that exemplifies the Qobuz vision and objectives and offers a high level of service and quality to an audience of savvy and demanding music-lovers.
The Benefits
The project owes its success to a framework that privileges specific services of the trade. The Symfony contribution to Qobuz.com: creating the first, and to this day, only site to allow downloading (in purchase mode) and unlimited streamed reading (by subscription) of such a large, high-quality musical catalogue. To the millions of available titles in "true CD quality sound", they have added over 2,000 Studio Masters Sound (24 bit up to 192 kHz studio sound). Such a unique service requires a particularly robust, stable and high-performance infrastructure. Symfony brought all of this and more.
In addition, Symfony also participated in numerous technical and functional innovations. It helped design a custom CMS, an asset which enables record stores and journalists the possibility to express themselves, and built public APIs that are used today by an application-rich ecosystem. Several examples include: Qobuz desktop (OS X, Windows) Qobuz Mobile (iOS, android) passing through integration in Hi-Fi systems like Sonos, not to mention the applications developed around these APIs by the community to integrate squeezebox or the XBMC media center.
And Qobuz teams won’t stop there. “We are growing many projects, for which we plan to use Symfony2” says Rabye Marouene. Without a doubt, Symfony guarantees success for the next installment of Qobuz products.
