Rdio is Now Free on the Web
blog.rdio.com
blog.rdio.com
Even little things are pleasantly surprising. If I have my laptop hooked up to speakers at a party playing through Rdio, I can change the song from my phone.
The only thing it doesn't have that I'd like is Grooveshark-esque queue building. Every music player could just lift Grooveshark's queueing system wholesale and everyone would be much happier.
My only complaint with the service so far is that they haven't made adding gapless playback a priority.
I still love the service, but their apps need a bit of love.
Spotify feels way too much like iTunes to me. That's not a compliment. My only fear is that I've picked the wrong side in this one and that Rdio will be gone soon enough.
However, when you change the slider, it advances the song (whether or not the current song is by the station's artist).
In this case, however, I don't see the reason for skipping the currently playing song. I'm assuming that they've already had to pay for the current play so they might as well let it play out before skipping to the cheaper rotation.
Now I'm a happy Rdio subscriber. I just wish they would have real native desktop client.
Still love the service, I don't have much use for "Offline" capability on my laptop/desktop - the mobile/tablet apps serve that need just fine.
That said, the way that search works on their iOS app does tend to frustrate me. Search for an artist, play one of their songs, go back to search, and your query plus all the results are gone. I kinda just wish that they'd keep them there for me, since I usually wanna find another song by the same artist after that. Maybe that's not actually a common use case though.
The UX of the desktop and mobile apps turned into a mess after they introduced a bunch of sliding panes, and the iOS app crashes so much I don't bother with it anymore.
I'm still a subscriber because it's one of the few streaming services available outside US, otherwise I would be looking at alternatives.
I'm a huge Rdio fan and love almost all aspects of its design, but (especially on iOS) I regularly get confused as to where I am and how to get back. A few moment's thought (or just fumbling between panels) gets me where I'm going, but there are simply too many almost-the-same-but-actually-different panels sliding around to be intuitive. It's particularly messy when trying to juggle browsing music with a managing a currently playing playlist.
But the worst thing - a good part of my collection has gone "unavailable" as they lose music licenses. It's the risk you take when you're subscribing to music, but it seems to not happen as frequently on Spotify - at least for me. On one Rdio mix playlist I had, for example, nearly 40% of the tracks became available. Really a bummer. I liked Rdio's simplicity, but for me personally, the experience was really lousy.
But nonetheless, versus Pandora? I’m leaving my Pandora One sub behind.
I liked Pandora a lot. I LOVE Rdio. It's gorgeous, robust, and flexible. Great product.
https://play.spotify.com/user/rmeijerink/playlist/0owSCmXQJw... https://play.spotify.com/user/xbrett82/playlist/2eheCERq82SL... https://play.spotify.com/user/pbrown148/playlist/3r46U16o2yl...
Unfortunately Spotify doesn't provide an easy way to manage playlists. Yes, there are folders but once you have 100ish playlists it kind of gets difficult.
If I wanted to migrate I would want to copy these playlists form Spotify to Rdio, which is nearly impossible without a lot of manual labour.
And then there's the audio quality. The songs constantly sound better on Spotify than on Rdio (that's at least my impression).
Ah and for me Spotify is actually cheaper than Rdio (I have Spotify premium for offline mobile support). The mobile playlist sync feature is awesome: I don't have to touch the phone in order for Spotify to update my offline playlists (on Android at least) for all the playlists I have tagged on my phone.
In their defence, I notice that the blog is name spaced as "US". Still, boo.
I'm in Australia, where a parliamentary report encourages users to use technological means to bypass geographic restrictions[1].
If I use a service it is true I must agree to their terms of service. However, if I'm not in the jurisdiction those terms apply to it is unclear if they can be legally enforced.
Additionally, it is also unclear if those ToS are broken at all by using an unblocking service. Typically the aim is to restrict serving music to any client outside the area the music license applies to, and music licensing companies understand completely that geographic restrictions can be bypassed.
It is actually in the interest of the licensing company that you do bypass the block. Then they get paid for the stream.
It isn't in the interest of the license holder in your jurisdiction that you bypass it, but in most jurisdictions they don't have grounds for a complaint: they can't actually make you use their service (especially if it doesn't exist).
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-29/geo-blocking-mps-commi...
http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/19/5123004/rdio-lays-off-emp...
The music streaming business seems like an extraordinarily difficult place to compete.
The reason I say this is because the quality is noticeably worse than Spotify, and I feel they won't release the numbers because they know they can't compete.
I just want some transparency. The UI and experience is beautiful, but the quality is lacking.
With my UK account, I get "You're out of free music. Subscribe now for unlimited music."
In the US.
Took me a while to find out what a free, unsubscribed account was.
The design is really washed out. Very lightweight grey fonts that are very difficult to read. It's all a bit white and bright. Stylbot for Chrome helps a little there as there aren't any user settings to change the colour scheme.
Oh some mystery meat navigation, click on the bottom bar to bring up the current playlist. Actually you have to do quite a bit of click experimentation, to find out what the icons do. Would be nice to have some hover tips.
Oh and you can scroll the playlist, it's not at all obvious!
Gripes aside, quite nice. Will see how I get on with it.
I've been wishing Spotify had this functionality for as long as I've been using it. Time to call it a day and go else where for my music.
Also the spotify iPhone app is shit, but I haven't used Rdio's enough yet to compare.
So what is happening to the $5/mo service that is the same as the now-ad-supported service, but without the ads? I listen to an average of less than one song per day and only need it on my desktop, laptop, ipad, etc -- so there is no way I'm paying $10/mo for what used to be $5 and if I wanted to listen to ads, I'd just turn on terrestrial radio.
I switched from Spotify 8 months ago and at first it was a breathe of fresh air but I soon started noticing issues with the desktop client. It's just a UIWebView that loads the web app. Album artwork loads slowly if you've got a large collection, UI interactions are unresponsive and will often time out.
The other major issue is having albums in your collection become unplayable due to what looks like licensing issues, only to reappear months later as the same album, except not in your collection. Spotify doesn't seem to have this issue.
From their customer support in their knowledge-base:
-------- "We're not currently providing specific bitrate or codec information. We experiment with different rates and encoding formats in an effort to provide the best possible listening and user-experience, and stream CD-quality audio over the web and wifi (for mobile devices), and only stream a lower bitrate if you’re on a 3G connection.
We realize that is not be as much detail as you’d like, and we apologize for this — if you have feedback about Rdio’s sound quality as you're listening, please do let us know." --------
Anybody else experience this?
(Having said that the Spotify app's windowing is a bit ugly and glitchy for me. I think it's a Qt app and I mainly have GTK apps.)