On the desktop PC (or Mac) it could be described as an immense free jukebox that allows you to the music of your choice and make libraries of your favourite bands and tunes, instantly, a-la iTunes. But for free. The trick being that you don’t legally ‘own’ the music, but you stream it via the internet.
Finally, it’s arrived on one of TechReview's favourite mobile toy. The Spotify app for Apple’s iPhone launched on Monday 7 September 2009. Within days it has become the number one app in the app store (no mean feat, considering there are over 75,000 out there already).
But is it any good? Does it actually work? Is the hype justified? Read on.
All your ears can eat
Once you have downloaded the app to your iPhone you reach the sign-in page, which instantly requires you to sign up for a Spotify Premium account (at a cost of RM60 a month, which can be cancelled at any time – so no signing into long twelve month or more contracts here!). And while too few people actually like paying for music any more, you do get the bonus of never having to put up with those mildly annoying ads that pop up now and then on the desktop version of the app.
After swallowing the bitter pill of paying to use Spotify on iPhone, the app itself is no less than a joy to use. Your iPhone music library mirrors whatever you have on your desktop music library (and vice versa).
You can search for tunes almost instantly if you are on a Wi-Fi connection, or within seconds if you are on a 3G connection. And you can save up to 3333 of your favourite tunes as ‘offline playlists’ which you can choose to listen to any time you are not within range of a network. A massive bonus. And a feature that Spotify promises us will soon arrive on the desktop version.
Creating new playlists, or editing, deleting and fiddling around with your current ones is pretty quick and easy. We quickly got used to searching for the entire discographies of all of our favourite bands and ordering them accordingly.
While some users have reported issues with crashing and audio quality, we have experienced no such problems in the three days of hammering Spotify on the Jesus phone. We imagine that only hardcore audiophiles listening to their iPhone music via thousands of pounds worth of expensive hi-fi kit or noise-cancelling cans might notice a difference in music fidelity.
Just for the record, Spotify’s iPhone music is streamed using the Ogg Vorbis codec at 160kbps, compared with the premium desktop version which runs at 320kbps. Which means that should you plug your desktop version into your home hi-fi kit, you won’t be disappointed.
It is the “Offline Playlists” button on the app that really does it for us. We’ve even gone so far as to remove the iPod icon from the four perma-icons at the bottom of the iPhone’s screen and replaced it with a Spotify perma-icon. Syncing music is pretty fast, although if you are syncing an entire 3,333 worth of tunes via your Wi-Fi, you might want to go and do something else for an hour or two (or just leave it on overnight).
We will still use the iPod app on our iPhone to keep an essential few albums that we want to listen to at all times, mainly because you cannot do anything else on the phone while listening to your Spotify tunes, while you can always listen to your iPod albums in the background while browsing Safari, checking your email, updating your Facebook/Flickr and doing whatever bits and bobs you do while glued to your shiny new 3GS. (Reportedly the new Android and S60 versions will run perfectly in the background).
But, by Spotify landing on the iPhone, music just got better.
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