181–190 of 266 posts
I really liked Grooveshark because it had a proper HTML5 player before they shut down. I was looking for alternatives and recently found Rdio and was quite happy with it, actually it has a lot in common with Grooveshark (e.g. user stations). Both Spotify and Deezer have web apps but they require Flash. Spotify has forwarded people asking for an HTML player to the forum and they have successfully ignored it for years.…
Bummer. I really like(liked?) Rdio. I've been a subscriber for several years -- the UI I find to be pretty good, but their mobile apps are garbage. So, who wants to write up an Rdio -> Spotify migration tool?
I was just looking at this one: https://github.com/jacobian/rdio2spotify
I was one of Rdio's first employees (3rd) and have been a happy subscriber since Craig got billing to work. After FB employees got free Rdio, they gave Rdio employees free Rdio as well, but I kept paying—to retain the right to bitch. (I got a free account for my wife though.) My entire extended family have been paying for and swearing by Rdio for years. I was introduced to Erlang at Rdio (this shaped the future of my…
I just started noodling around with some code last week to bridge the messaging gap within my own company (we're supposed to use Lync, or Skype, or whatever it's called now, but nobody does because we've all used it), so we have a mish mash of users on a variety of networks, and I'm looking forward to using sameroom, and hopefully, get to abandon the code I was working on.
I really liked Grooveshark because it had a proper HTML5 player before they shut down. I was looking for alternatives and recently found Rdio and was quite happy with it, actually it has a lot in common with Grooveshark (e.g. user stations). Both Spotify and Deezer have web apps but they require Flash. Spotify has forwarded people asking for an HTML player to the forum and they have successfully ignored it for years.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking to the question you posed at the end: Having worked at Grooveshark I think Google Music is the obvious choice now that Rdio will soon be gone.
I had Google Music for 6 months and, while their music selection is great, their UI is horrendous. For example if I'm scrolling through an artists albums, they would list every release of an album (European release, NA release, Japan release, extended version, radio friendly, non-radio friendly). Maybe that's nice for some? It was just a hassle for me. Overall navigation through the app I found to be really, really b…
As different album releases often contain different recordings, sometimes finding EXACTLY the song I want to hear is hard to do. Having fallen for Sublime when they were still playing live shows, but knowing that they were only able to capitalize on their fame after the death of their singer, they've (necessarily) released a bunch of versions of old songs, which are often vastly different from one another. Finding JUST the right recording of a particular song is only enabled by having that otherwise needless duplication in the selection process, and I'm certainly willing to endure that if it means being able to add every version of X to my queue to find just the one I was looking for.
Offtopic, if they could only add Whitesnake's "Starkers in Tokyo" recording, I'd have just the right version of "Here I Go Again" in my library.
I was one of Rdio's first employees (3rd) and have been a happy subscriber since Craig got billing to work. After FB employees got free Rdio, they gave Rdio employees free Rdio as well, but I kept paying—to retain the right to bitch. (I got a free account for my wife though.) My entire extended family have been paying for and swearing by Rdio for years. I was introduced to Erlang at Rdio (this shaped the future of my…
> "Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old. Genuinely curious here - why are so many techies desperately passionate (both positive and negative) about choice of unseemly unnecessary tech products? I feel like there is this peculiar subculture of tech-minded folk who defend at odds their tech choices. "Slack is the best" "Hell no, IRC has been around for years!…
I was one of Rdio's first employees (3rd) and have been a happy subscriber since Craig got billing to work. After FB employees got free Rdio, they gave Rdio employees free Rdio as well, but I kept paying—to retain the right to bitch. (I got a free account for my wife though.) My entire extended family have been paying for and swearing by Rdio for years. I was introduced to Erlang at Rdio (this shaped the future of my…
> "Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old. Genuinely curious here - why are so many techies desperately passionate (both positive and negative) about choice of unseemly unnecessary tech products? I feel like there is this peculiar subculture of tech-minded folk who defend at odds their tech choices. "Slack is the best" "Hell no, IRC has been around for years!…
But that has nothing to do with our 15-y-o — she grew up with Rdio and it's the only streaming music service she's ever known.
Rdio made a mistake by trying to compete directly with Spotify. And Pandora is making a huge mistake by shutting down the service and losing a valuable niche group of users. Everyone I know who actually uses Rdio is DIE HARD (I see evidence of this in the comments too). The users I know are pro audio guys, musicians, programmers, artists, etc who use the app 6+ hours a day across desktop and mobile. Rdio could easily…
In my experience the Android application, while able to do gapless, was not able to consistently _stay logged in and play music_. Or feed back track identity through bluetooth devices to cars and the Pebble.
The only "improvements" made to either the desktop or the mobile application seemed to be about making it harder to see or filter which songs you had added to your Favourites.
I wanted it to work out, but it became so frustrating that I gave up a bit under a year ago and went back to Spotify.
I was one of Rdio's first employees (3rd) and have been a happy subscriber since Craig got billing to work. After FB employees got free Rdio, they gave Rdio employees free Rdio as well, but I kept paying—to retain the right to bitch. (I got a free account for my wife though.) My entire extended family have been paying for and swearing by Rdio for years. I was introduced to Erlang at Rdio (this shaped the future of my…
Offtopic, but thank you for starting (and linking to) sameroom. I just started noodling around with some code last week to bridge the messaging gap within my own company (we're supposed to use Lync, or Skype, or whatever it's called now, but nobody does because we've all used it), so we have a mish mash of users on a variety of networks, and I'm looking forward to using sameroom, and hopefully, get to abandon the cod…
We're likely to build something that works with S4B (Lync) soon. Working on a Jabber bridge now, which is similar, deployment-wise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spotify also has a native(-ish) OSX client (can you use Google Music outside the browser?) and excellent playlist drag/drop and sharing support. Plus, I love their iOS user interface. No other service has come close in either area. I just wish they had better local file support.
A couple of years ago Spotify rewrote their clients to use CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework), so since then their clients are in some sense native and in some sense not, and much more consistent across platforms. Anyway, I agree with you that they have been pushing the envelope in terms of mobile functionality, especially iOS. Lately I'm not happy with how Android has crippled their lock screen experience by screwing…
Eh. And not to sound like a cranky old man, but that shit sucks.
It's ridiculous that their "app" needs 20-30 seconds to boot on a modern computer. It's a damned music player. Plus, when the machine is under load, it skips like a 1993 disc player. And the damned thing crashes routinely.
Pre-CEF I was terribly impressed by their mac client. It's been a pretty ugly cliff they've fallen off though. They did a developer blog post some time ago detailing how teams are all using separate JS routines and libs... and I have to say, I wasn't surprised. It's rare that a popular app regresses in performance and usability quite as much as they have.