Spotify, any thoughts?

My senior pupils are telling me that I should be ditching itunes/amazon and using this.Anyody use this site?

Yep. It's excellent. iTunes like interface where you can search for any song or artist and instantly play it.

Its great 🙂 If you are really into your music, pay for the subscription service and you can get rid of the ads and use the service on a smartphone.

I don't pay as I find the ads are quite unintrusive.

Its great. Its more an online jukebox than a library of tunes as such and the quality is not great but I use it all the time.

Can you save the music or just play it?

just play it on the free one, but you can save playlists etc – you have to be online as well obviously.

Technically you can't save it (at least not on the free version) but of course any program like mp3mymp3 (Basically just records whatever's playing on your computer) would allow you to do that if you wanted.

Doesn't have half the tracks I look for (though it seems to return plenty of "bob singing the same tune in his back yard studio" type covers) and consistently breaks up despite an 7.6 meg line. Not a fan anymore.

consistently breaks up despite an 7.6 meg line

Flawless on my line, even while heavy surfing.
7.6 should be more than adequate for streaming music, unless your line is very flaky, or you're also downloading torrents or something?

Works perfectly at home on a wireless 2mb connection. Listening to it now at work 🙂 Even though I work in a recording studio I've never been tempted to leave a sound app recording in the backbround, coz that would be naughty

[/sniggers]

Works perfectly for me and +1 for not finding the ads too intrusive. like coffeeking I find some of the stuff I want to listen to not there, but overall it's great.

I still buy music rather than just stream it, so use Spotify to give an album a good listen before parting with the readies

I get around 1MB at home and can listen to Spotify for hours on end without a single glitch. Infact I have never experienced an outage on Spotify aside from when I arrived this morning at work. Client needed to be restarted. As for the sound quality, It's as good as CDs to my gig-trashed ears.

I wish more of the Warp Records catalogue was on there though. Bit lacking in electronica

if your on a shared connection, dont expect to be very popular with anyone else trying to use the connection at the same time as you.

How do you get to use it for free? It seems that you need an invite from a premium user, but I don't know anyone that has a premium account.

I just went to the Spotify website and signed up – perhaps I was lucky?

The vast majority of my music listening comes through Spotify now. I can't remember the last time I put a CD on!

MS,
spotify sign-up link

When it first started out, you could just sign up for a free account so that's how I got mine – as you say, it's changed now so you need to know someone with a premium account. Just ask on facebook/here/etc

umm…^

Del, thanks for the link, but it doesn't work. Does anyone here have an invite they might be willing to pass my way?

Del, your link is broke. I think you meant http://www.spotify.com/get-started
but if you go there you'll see that you need an invitation code.

oh yeah. bad luck. worked up until about a week ago, at least.

tiggs121 – Member

Can you save the music or just play it?

play only, theoretically – you can rip stuff from it if you want, but as far as i know it's real time recording only. worth it for rare stuff, though.

mansonsoul – Member

Del, thanks for the link, but it doesn't work. Does anyone here have an invite they might be willing to pass my way?

yep just tested it – looks like they've closed that loophole.

3 invites spare here. email in profile, first come first served.

A good alternative is http://www.last.fm

Type in a band you like, and LastFM plays you music from other bands in the genre. Its works through the webpage, so no having to download software and the ads are much less intrusive than Spotify (which I find really annoying, and they get more frequent at peak times I find).

2 invites gone. 1 left

Surfr – I'll have you if you have any left.

jonchapman15[at]hotmail[dot]com

cheers,

I wanted a bit of De La Soul and the choice was rubbish, apart form that it's the best thing ever invented by man

i have spotify and got it free ages ago. whats the deal now then. you can only "get in" if you know a paying member? not very good if your a lonelly nerd sitting at home wanting some music…

i love it tho,wish it did a kind of itunes…"if you like that,you may also like"… then you could surf forever…

no original AC/DC mind 😥

Shame you can't get Pandora over here any more – the cross-referencing/suggesting software on that was excellent.

Anyone know how to trick Pandora?

Surfr, thanks for the invite!

my lad introduced me to grooveshark which is similar (I think)

Anyone got anymore spare invites? tyger@talk21.com
Thanks

Thanks surfr!

Shame you can't get Pandora over here any more

glenp – have you tried last.fm? I never used Pandora, but sounds similar.

Flawless on my line, even while heavy surfing.
7.6 should be more than adequate for streaming music, unless your line is very flaky, or you're also downloading torrents or something?

Nope, was otherwise very nippy – in fact did a connection test mid-music and mid-evening which came out at 2meg. Seems as though it's buffering (30 seconds fine, then a 1 min blank), so I'm taking a guess that Tiscali are traffic shaping. Either way, it's still useless for me.

i've got some invites if anyone needs them

Thanks for the tip Kit – will give that a spin. Shame I've lost all my Pandora playlists and preferences though.

i've put my email address in my profile as i'll forget to check back here