[Nels Ferre]

I downloaded and signed up for Spotify yesterday.

This service rocks! For $9.95 a month for the Premium service (free is not yet available in the U.S.) you can stream "nearly every CD" in existence  commercial free at a 320 bit per second rate. Also, they have clients for mobile phones as well, so you take take music with you on your iPhone or Android.

The program is easy to use. As I think of a CD I would like to have, I add it to my playlist. I plan to use that list as a shopping list to get lossless versions as funds permit- my playlist is getting quite long already. I have also added a few CDs to the playlist of music that I only have on vinyl- that way I can listen in the car.

Spotify free looks like it will be a lower bit rate, as well as adding commercials.

Check it out.

www.spotify.com

Edit: Premium also works with Sonos and Squeezebox.

Currently playing on my Spotify: Dire Straits- Live at the BBC
Next up- Whatever I think of

[Steven Stone]

I wrote about my experiences with Spotify here:

http://audiophilereview.com/audiophile-music/a-weekend-with-spotify.html

I think, despite it's late arrival in the USA, that it has a place in the wireless future...

[Nels Ferre]

Nice article.

A couple of glitches:

It works better at home than in a moving automobile. I experience occasional dropouts on my 40 mile one way commute. I get no dropouts at home. Then again the cell phone is 3G and i have something like 15 megabytes per second downloads speed at home, so this not really a Spotify issue.

Some tracks on some albums are grayed out, either they are not yet available in the US, or the artist has chosen not to make the track available. Oddly, the exact same album may be listed again with all of the tracks available. One would think the album would only be listed once, to make navigation easier and make the database smaller. Their database has to be mind boggling.

I use it all day at work (no dropouts on the cell there) plugged into some amplified desktop speakers. I am really pleased.

[mgalusha]

I received my invite yesterday and just now installed it on my shop machine, very cool and surprisingly good quality given that we only have 1.5Mbit DSL. 

[dmatt]

I am a heavy Pandora user so this looks interesting.

However, I saw someone on another audio board mention this:

"I was going to sign up until I read their terms of service. It requires you to allow them to use your computer to serve data to other Spotify members... Check section 13 "Advertising and use of computational resources", particularly substection ii."

Did any of you come across this in the terms of service?

Thanks.

David 
 

[mcoaggie]

I've gotten the invite and have been using the free version.  I really like the interface.  I've come across a few missing songs from artists but haven't researched how they obtain the rights or why these were missing.

Another solution that a friend pointed out to me is
Grooveshark.  The interface doesn't seem as nice but it is all browser based and all on demand.  I've only played around with it for a couple hours but it seems pretty good.

[low.pfile]

With you guys mentioning it, and my friend telling me to sign up, I downloaded it and tried the free version.

It sees my iTunes library, including my playlists (though not the Smart Playlists!) The issue I am experiencing is that my library is AIFF based, so Spotify does not read all of the albums. It ONLY reads the songs I have converted to AAC (for my iphone), or mp3s from demo material, as well as other compressed formats. Because of this, I have less than half of my 1000+ album iTunes library available in Spotify. Sure, it's free, what I am I complaining about?!

The screenshot below shows a custom iTunes playlist selected in Spotify with the message that essentially says that playlist is empty--it is not, it's filled with AIFF format songs.

I've had limited listening experience with Spotify, but the decreased quality of the 160kb/s tracks is noticeable with my built in iMac speakers. The paid membership uses 320kb/s tracks so that should sound very good, especially since the system is likely a portable/remote system(read non-critical). I have no plans to pay for the service at this point. I do need to work on reorganizing my iTunes library for iPhone/iPod use anyway so maybe then spotify will be more appealing to me.

[SwedeSound]

I got on it yesterday and am in love. Bought the Airfoil app for $25, allowing me to stream to my Airport Express feeding a DAC via optical link. This is seriously good fun. And good sound. So far, no dropouts. And having almost every song imaginable available at my fingertips is a blast. Apple's app store has a couple Spotify remote apps to choose from so I can control it from my iPhone. Once I do that, I think it will be hard to get me off the couch from my listening spot. It's pretty amazing. Curious to see what others think of the sound quality. I have no quibbles. I haven't A-B'd anything to compare to my Lossless files (which I stream the same way from my Mac) or to CDs. But I can. I'll report back after I do.

Swede

[mr_bill]

Spotify - search for the spotify forum thread that discusses that only 30% of the library is available in 320 kbs streaming - the rest is 160.  This is with the premium service and has given me pause from changing from Rhapsody which sounds pretty good.

[neekomax]

Just signed up for the free service... This is the ultimate album preview tool IMO! Since I already have Airfoil for Mac, it's instant fun!

Now previewing this:

[DougSmith]

I am a MOG user, but tried out the free version of Spotify to see what their catalog of songs looked like.  To my disappointment, I found that artists missing on MOG were generally missing on Spotify as well.  On the other hand, a number of my favorites available on MOG were not available on Spotify. Here is an interesting comparison of the two services:  . 

[neekomax]

I am a MOG user, but tried out the free version of Spotify to see what their catalog of songs looked like.  To my disappointment, I found that artists missing on MOG were generally missing on Spotify as well.  On the other hand, a number of my favorites available on MOG were not available on Spotify. Here is an interesting comparison of the two services:  .

But MOG requires a $ubscription, n'est-ce pas? The whole thing about Spotify is its freeness. For $, you could have had a Rhapsody account years ago, right?

[DougSmith]

Sure, free with restrictions.  The sound quality from Rhapsody is lower than the other two, but I actually still subscribe to that as well because my wife uses it.