Spotify

[cstone]

Not sure how many of you are music listeners over the interwebz, but I used Pandora for a while. Nice enough but a bit limited.

Spotify was released in the US about a month and a half ago and I've been playing with it since then, and I can absolutely recommend it as the best online, free music service I have ever used.

http://www.spotify.com/us/hello-america/comb/

[Coffee]

[OneGuy67]

Is it like Limewire or Napster?

[cstone]

No. It isn't P2P software, and Spotify only lists titles after they have made arrangements with the DRM holder. If you Google Spotify, there are some interesting articles, mostly from the UK since they have been operating there for quite some time.

From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify

Technical function

The Spotify software is proprietary and uses digital rights management (DRM) to prevent unauthorized use of content. Users who agree to Spotify's Terms and Conditions may not reverse engineer the application.[48]

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 intuitively connecting to other users to exchange cached data as appropriate. There are currently no official details from the developers about how many connections and how much of a user's upstream bandwidth the Spotify client will use when streaming to other users; the Spotify client offers no way for the user to configure this.

Audio streams are in the Vorbis format at q5 (approx ~160 kbit/s),[49] or optional q9 (approx ~320kbit/s)[50] for Premium subscribers, the highest streaming rate for any online service. Spotify boasts having an almost buffer-free streaming service.

As of version 0.4.3, it is possible to also play back local MP3 and AAC files, though this does not work in Linux using Wine because Spotify is "[...] blocking codecs with the identifier “WINE-MPEG3″ until the Wine system works satisfactorily."[51] In the native Linux version it works normally.

Cache size and location is configurable. 1 GB or more disk space is recommended. On Mac OS X, a G4 processor or higher is required. A user must set up an account in order to use the software. This account can be used on several computers, but music playback is limited to one computer at a time.

[DANGERTASTIC!]

Thank you for sharing! We use Pandora at work, The word "Limited" that you used pretty much sums it up. They play one song from an album, its like the radio, only on the internet and without commercials.

Ill have to check this out

[DFBrews]

giving a whirl as we speak

[mcantar18c]

Don't have time to check it out right now but can you actually search for and play for a song? That pisses me off like hell about Pandora, I usually just use youtube.

[Half Live]

We used to use Pandora at work but since it limits how much you can listen to monthly and we listen to it for like 10 hours a day, we stopped using it. We now use Jango Radio.

[kuchdut]

I know, I know...I've just performed thread necro-something-nasty sounding...But since I've just recently tried Spotify and LOVE it, I thought I'd share (and I even searched prior to posting!).

I've always like Pandora, but some damn times I just wanna listen to an entire album...Spotify lets you do that (and yes, I AM being paid by them...or at least hope to be some day).

It's good stuff

[Great-Kazoo]

Spotify is good Check out grooveshark.

[Irving]

I thought you had to have Facebook to use Spotify?

[KestrelBike]

You do not need facebook. You will need to create a Spotify user account however.

[Dingo]

+1 for Grooveshark - it lets you search for specific songs and albums.

[kuchdut]

That's definitely what it looks like, but there is always a little option someplace else on there to create a Spotify login (which I did, cuz I'm one of the 5% of the population that doesn't have a FB account at all).

I like Groove Shark very much, and used to pimp it out, big time to my friends...Spotify just feels like a little more well honed version of GS to me...Like em both, but I go to Spotify for everything now.