Playing around with Spotify…
Couple of Spotify notes. I have been a premium member since last week, as the offline capability is very important to me. Their catalog is indeed quite deep. However in a few days of use, I am experiencing quite a few annoying issues: songs that don’t play for any apparent reason (e.g., a whole album is saved to a playlist, and songs 2 and 3 just won’t play), the mobile app refused to recognize my bluetooth headset on my iphone (something I haven’t seen with any other app). These are just a few things that I would have expected to not experience in a service that has been live in Europe for more than a year now. I see they are pushing updates out for their apps, but I am pretty sure I am up-to-date and still see issues.
I also find the UI not quite intuitive, or at least not nearly as intuitive as I did for both Lala and Rdio, the latter of which I was also a premium subscriber. Their search UI is good for individual tracks, but if you search by artist, there isn’t a good album browsing experience (people still do albums, right?). The UI for that is very constrained and if you bounce around a bit, it is easy to lose your place. Also, to save or bookmark a whole album, you need to create a new playlist for it — which I guess is OK, but seems like a minor hassle and it took me a moment to figure out. With Rdio, I think you could just “add it to your collection”. Also, if you want to then listen to that album while offline, you need to go to your mobile device, sync up the playlists (which will happen automatically), and then on the mobile device mark it as “available offline”. Again, Rdio seemed more elegant because not only could you add an album to your collection, you could also then mark it immediately as available on your mobile device for offline listening and it all just synced up on your iphone. It could be that Spotify’s way is smarter if you want to sync different playlists to different devices for offline usage, but, well, whatever.
YMMV. I think I need to revisit Rdio, because although I liked the service, I tried it out when it first launched and found the catalog a little thin, so I dropped it. But my understanding is that they have a deeper catalog now. On the bright side, I did just sync up this giant multi-CD set of the Modern Jazz Quartert…
