How Playback Works

Why some tracks play instantly and others take a moment.

The music is stored onchain-adjacent, permanently.

Most works stream their audio from decentralized storage like IPFS or Arweave. This is a feature — the music is meant to last — but it has a cost: the first time a track is fetched from a cold gateway, it can take a few seconds to start, especially for large lossless files.

Resona streams through a proxy for reliability.

Some storage gateways are slow, rate-limit heavy traffic, or are unreachable from certain networks. Resona routes audio and artwork through its own caching proxy so playback stays reliable and works even where a gateway is directly unreachable. This proxy is a technical relay for reliability and reach — Resona is not the source of the music, and does not claim any distribution right over it. The original onchain source remains authoritative.

What you might notice.

A track played for the first time may buffer briefly ("loading lossless audio…") before it starts; once cached, it plays fast. Occasionally a work's underlying storage is temporarily unavailable and a track won't play — this is usually an upstream gateway issue, not the track being gone.

What we're improving.

Faster gateway pooling, edge caching, and lighter streaming renditions are on the roadmap. During beta, some cold-start slowness is expected and honest.