All hail Spotify!

Posted by Stevieb | Filed under Awesomeness, Tech

I can get a bit jaded with all the rubbish new music services I get bombarded with every day, which is why it’s such a breath of fresh air when something comes along that ticks every single box. For me, Spotify is that thing. Spotify is a streaming service. It just streams, but by holy shit does it do it well. It has three things that set it apart from other, similar offerings – catalogue, speed and social functions.

Firstly, Catalogue. It seems to put just about every song in the entire world at your fingertips, streamable within a few seconds. Majors, indies, everyone seems to be on board. There was only one record I looked for, in an extensive list of obscure stuff, that I couldn’t find.

Secondly, it’s lightning fast. Rather than being built around a website, you download a small application to play your music in. Some might consider this a disadvantage, but I disagree. It’s responsive, lightweight in terms of memory footprint (just 13MB for me), and echoes Songbird’s design, which is never a bad reference point.

Lastly, the social functions. As with most other music “players” you can not only create playlists, but you can share and edit them in realtime. For example if you have Spotify installed, click the below link, it will allow you access to my “Random” playlist, you can add songs to it, remove songs and even copy the playlist to your own priavte Spotify setup.  Very simple, very easy, very intuitive.

http://open.spotify.com/user/steviebdotnet/playlist/57uzNga7KcXZvH2YnDR5zK.

So where can you get it? Well, I’m afraid to say that Spotify is in private beta. At the moment, you can’t get in without an invite, and invites aren’t exactly thick on the ground yet. However, there’s a “premium” version that doesn’t include ads, costing a tenner a month, and if you shell out for that, then you can get in today. Money talks.

I’m dead impressed by Spotify. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a music service get everything right.  In the meantime, top marks for usability and implementation.

If I get any Spotify invites, I’ll offer them up on my Facebook page first of all, and if there are any left over I’ll post here.

Read more | Comments (0) | February 25th, 2009

Christian Bale, batshit insane…..

Posted by Stevieb | Filed under Funny, Movies

NSFW!!

Am I the only one this thinks this is a slight over-reaction to the situation? Someone walked onto the set in his line of sight while filming then new Terminator 4 movie, unsurprisingly this was a distraction; however this reaction was just a touch melodramatic. Funny as hell though! :D

Bloody actors…..

Read more | Comments (0) | February 4th, 2009