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General Category => Entertainment and Media => Topic started by: Marge on June 29, 2009, 06:10:20 pm

Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: Marge on June 29, 2009, 06:10:20 pm
If you know what Spotify is about and got an account, skip the first two paragraphs. If you live in Sweden, Norway, Finland, UK, France or Spain and listen to music you should pretty fucking interested and couldn't wait to get reading what this is about. Otherwise, I'm very sorry.


What is Spotify?
Spotify is the best thing that has happened to your music listening since your first cd player. It's a free music service that works by streaming. They've got a vast library of music you can listen to legally and free. Throw in a search term, a name, label, whatever, it gives you all they've got and you can listen to it. Download playlists someone else has made, check what Spotify is recommending you based on what you've been listening to or choose genre(s) and decade(s) and use it as a radio.  Of course the collection isn't perfect and they've got some big holes in it because of some labels or artists being jerks, but usually if you aren't looking for something completely obscure you'll be able to find at least an album or two, in many cases much, much more.

It has to funded somehow, so Spotify has ads. Some in the UI and some audio ads between songs. Not too many, maybe once in an album (this depends on where you live), but they are there. There's also the premium account which costs a little (around 10e/month I think) and gets rid of the ads and as a new feature gets you better sound quality on some albums (the normal one is OGG equivalent of 160kbps I think, which is fine for 95% of people). They use some kind of cloud computing system (think of torrents) and I don't know how the hell they do it but songs start to play practically immediately when you click play and I've never had one stop to buffer. Oh and it has integrated Last.fm support.


This is awesome, how do I get it?
If you live in Britain, just http://www.spotify.com and make yourself an account. If you live in the other countries listed in the beginning, Spotify is in invite only beta. This means you need an invite, but there are ways. One is a nice trick that worked at least a while ago. Go to http://spotifyinvite.tk fill in your info but as the postal code insert 13004 and the country should be France. Just remember to change those afterwards, Spotify won't let you use it from "abroad" for long. Also there are a lot of websites taking invites from donors and giving them away. Some to try are
http://skxpl.eu.org/spotify/
http://invitify.fleo.se/

I'll add these if I come across good ones.

If you live elsewhere, Spotify isn't available, though they've got plans to expand overseas. If you can figure out some nice way (proxies?) to cheat, post it.


GW playlist
Spotify has a neat feature called collaborative playlist, and GW needs one. Here you go: http://open.spotify.com/user/marges/playlist/7eTiOnnCpgxWAYSKZLkQWp

Anyone can add stuff and remove stuff, so feel free as long as it's good. The one rule is not to be a jerk. Being a jerk includes
-adding lots of songs from one artist (let's keep it at max 3-4)
-adding stupid stuff like Korn's 5 Seconds of Silence or something
-removing other people's songs unless they are being jerks
-lots of other things I can't even think of because I'm not a jerk

Here's the list I made to start with:

GO!
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: crone_lover720 on June 29, 2009, 07:02:09 pm
sounds like a european version of Pandora, is this true
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: Guana on June 29, 2009, 07:08:40 pm
Sort of, but instead of being just a radio you can actually choose what songs to listen.
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: Marge on June 29, 2009, 07:09:30 pm
I only used Pandora briefly, but isn't it more an internet radio that plays songs, you rate them and it plays you more the stuff you liked?

I use Spotify like I use foobar/winamp, they've just got a lot bigger library of music than I've got on my hard drive.
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: crone_lover720 on June 29, 2009, 07:14:56 pm
oh, yeah it is. I think members get more options but I dunno, I don't use it.
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: ThugTears666 on June 30, 2009, 01:31:53 am
Yeah one of my friends told me about this, you can just have a huge album of music online without downloading it. Sounds like a pretty neat idea.
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: UPRC on June 30, 2009, 08:00:18 pm
FUCK.

First Pandora is not available in Canada, and now this???
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: BlackRaven on July 03, 2009, 09:59:06 am
I love spotify! Use it all the time. It's got an enormous library and when they update (pretty often) they add like tens of thousands of tracks. Oh, and the ads in the free version don't bother me at all

EDIT: And the streaming is instantaneous, you don't notice that the songs aren't on your computer
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: Guana on July 03, 2009, 10:48:05 am
So yeah, I've been using this for a while now too and so far it's pretty great. For me, Spotify has mostly replaced using youtube/warez for music. Less hassle and the sound quality is actually pretty good. They're still missing some big name artists though (Beatles, Metallica, Led Zeppelin for example) and you won't find anything too obscure.
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: DS on July 03, 2009, 01:11:04 pm
Spotify is really awesome. I still download and buy my music but I use spotify to check out new artists and it's great that I can do it easily instead of going to myspace, pure volume, youtube etc. to listen to some songs. Plus I prefer listening to albums and Spotify makes that possible. I haven't tried any of the playlist features but the idea of GW playlist is p.cool so I might contribute something later.

Also, the library is huge but there are a lot of artists, albums and songs you aren't going to find. But that's pretty obvious and they are constantly adding more music which is cool, you can't really expect more when it's free unless you want to become a subscriber.
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: Shepperd on July 06, 2009, 02:56:23 am
is that shit like Deezer? http://www.deezer.com/
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: DS on July 06, 2009, 03:45:14 am
Seems pretty similar, yeah. Both have the same basic idea at least. Seems like Deezer has a bit more features while Spotify has more songs and you need a Spotify client which works as a music player like winamp, foobar etc. I'm surprised that I haven't heard of Deezer before.
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: Marge on July 06, 2009, 09:39:16 am
Yeah, DS's right. Deezer seems to insist on adding stuff to playlists though, I don't get why I can't play them straight away. On first look it also seems more radio and community centric, with stuff like email between users. Spotify is more about just a massive catalogue you can listen to, playlists, radios and all that is just extra features. I just found a way to check how many songs Spotify has, in Finland it currently lists around 300k albums and 3,5 million songs.
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: DS on July 06, 2009, 10:07:04 am
I read somewhere that Spotify has around 6 million songs in total.
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: Shepperd on July 07, 2009, 12:50:31 am
yeah except Spotify is euro-elitist, extreme right wing sonofabitches, while Deezer is kantianic liberalism
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: ATARI on July 07, 2009, 12:52:58 am
yeah its kind of frustrating that shit like this is only centered to certain countries.  i'll stick with my external hard drive and torrented albums for now.
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: Marge on July 08, 2009, 05:02:18 pm
Spotify has only been around since October and is officially still in beta, I'd be surprised if they didn't expand to rest of Europe after a while. Going overseas is another thing then. I guess you could create an account through a proxy (like http://spotifyinvite.tk/ which I linked in the opening post) and use it for the two weeks Spotify allows you to be abroad, but after that you would need a new one. I did a quick google but didn't find anything useful about actually running Spotify through a proxy. Could something like Tor (http://www.torproject.org/) help?

Wiki claims most of the music on Deezer is there without permission, but I don't where they got that.

Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: Shepperd on July 08, 2009, 05:21:31 pm
Quote from: Marge on July 08, 2009, 05:02:18 pm
Wiki claims most of the music on Deezer is there without permission, but I don't where they got that.
now I repsect Deezer much more.
who needs permission to play music jeesus christ
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: the_bub_from_the_pit on July 08, 2009, 05:50:50 pm
I use grooveshark if i want to stream stuff, it's pretty good
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: bonzi_buddy on July 08, 2009, 06:04:51 pm
i'm not dead btw.

i love spotify. hopefully they branch out to other countries in the future because holy shit/no joke, best music-technology thing to happen in ages.
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: ATARI on July 08, 2009, 07:01:19 pm
Quote from: Marge on July 08, 2009, 05:02:18 pm
Spotify has only been around since October and is officially still in beta, I'd be surprised if they didn't expand to rest of Europe after a while. Going overseas is another thing then. I guess you could create an account through a proxy (like http://spotifyinvite.tk/ which I linked in the opening post) and use it for the two weeks Spotify allows you to be abroad, but after that you would need a new one. I did a quick google but didn't find anything useful about actually running Spotify through a proxy. Could something like Tor (http://www.torproject.org/) help?

Wiki claims most of the music on Deezer is there without permission, but I don't where they got that.


i'm not going to sign up for something that I'd have to keep re-signing up for every 2 weeks
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: Marge on July 08, 2009, 08:51:04 pm
Neither would I, that's why I could look into that Tor thing if I have time.
Title: Spotify & GW playlist
Post by: Marge on July 27, 2009, 09:31:30 am
A little heads-up: Spotify is launching a client for iPhone and in a little while probably for Google Android too, and according to BBC they're aiming to go overseas sometime this year.