Streaming music services comparison/recommendations

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Hush
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Streaming music services comparison/recommendations

Post by Hush »

As I mentioned in a couple of other threads I've been using Spotify for some time now as my main source of music.

One thing that has been bugging me as of late is their 'Radio' feature sucks. It always repeats the same songs way too often and is way too predictable in its selections. I've been using Pandora as a supplement but it has ads and I don't want to pay for two subscriptions.

I've been looking into Rdio as a possible substitute. Their radio features seem better (although I haven't had a chance to try them personally yet) and they have a station, "You FM" that plays stuff based off your entire collection/music preferences that evolves over time.

Too often with Spotify I'm not sure what I'm in the mood to listen to so I just want to pick something and go but their discovery features aren't very good.

Anyone using anything other than Spotify and why do you prefer that other service?

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Post by BigCat8 »

I'm using Google Play Music All Access, but it has some of the same issues you describe with Spotify. The radio usually consists of a handful of similar artists played over and over- sometimes consecutively. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" station has a bit more variety because it's based on your library, but I'm still not a huge fan of it.

Google Music has decent discovery- suggested items on your homepage including mood/activity-based stations, curated playlists on a separate page... but these aren't features I use often, so I can't say how well they actually work.

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Post by ChaMerZ »

hush i noticed you mentioning, in one of the threads in TROY, that Spotify isn't very good for old, obscure hip-hop. apparently you couldn't find like 80% of the songs you were looking for. you think maybe your selective music tastes are what's messing up Spotify's algorithm? Or is it the same for all types of music (i.e. playing the same song repeatedly)?

good thread. subbed.
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Re: Streaming music services comparison/recommendations

Post by Hush »

ChaMerZ wrote:hush i noticed you mentioning, in one of the threads in TROY, that Spotify isn't very good for old, obscure hip-hop. apparently you couldn't find like 80% of the songs you were looking for. you think maybe your selective music tastes are what's messing up Spotify's algorithm? Or is it the same for all types of music (i.e. playing the same song repeatedly)?

good thread. subbed.
It seems to be the same for any genre. It is especially noticable when I use a large diverse playlist as a basis for a radio station. I expect it to play a huge variety of songs with no repeats at least for a few hours, but it seems to still play the same 15 or so songs over and over, even repeating in the exact same order. Makes we wonder if the radio feature isn't meant for extended listening sessions.

I'm trying out Beats Music right now (7 day trial). It seems pretty cool so far and has a "Just For You" screen which is the first thing displayed when you open the ios app. It recommends albums and playlists curated by their staff based on your listening habits and preferences. This morning I was listening to a playlist of Muggs produced songs and I was relatively impressed when a Mellow Man Ace song came on in addition to Xzibit "The Foundation" and others.

Google Play All Access seems like it would be the ideal solution (being able to upload 20,000 tracks like the stuff I mentioned in the other thread that is missing from Spotify and probably other services as well). The problem with their service though is I've heard even on "low" quality it eats up much more bandwidth, not to mention the songs you upload I assume stream at whatever quality you upload them in. I listen on my daily commute so I need something that isn't going to easily push me over my 4GB data cap. Also there ios app isn't great and is kind of slow starting up and loading your library.

After the Beats trial is over I'm planning on trying out Rdio as I mentioned previously.

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Post by BigCat8 »

Hush wrote:Google Play All Access seems like it would be the ideal solution (being able to upload 20,000 tracks like the stuff I mentioned in the other thread that is missing from Spotify and probably other services as well). The problem with their service though is I've heard even on "low" quality it eats up much more bandwidth, not to mention the songs you upload I assume stream at whatever quality you upload them in. I listen on my daily commute so I need something that isn't going to easily push me over my 4GB data cap. Also there ios app isn't great and is kind of slow starting up and loading your library.
Can you offline cache stuff on Spotify? If I have a long road trip ahead, I'll usually offline some stuff on Google Music.

Data usage was bad during the early days of Google Music, but it's been fine for me since the first 2 months or so. I've never gone over my 2 GB, but I generally don't have far to drive for work, etc. The bulk of my mobile streaming is usually about an hour round-trip 6-10 times a month. This month was very atypical so I can't offer a solid data amount based on this month, but I did about 100MB yesterday on about an hour's worth of streaming.

All this is kinda moot if the app sucks, though.

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Re: Streaming music services comparison/recommendations

Post by Hush »

Interesting, maybe I should give Google another try for a month and see how the data usage goes. Also, the app seems to have improved since the last time I used it.

I don't really want to bother with making stuff available offline. I like being able to just stream whatever, whenever.

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Post by Philaflava »

I got tons of obscure shit on my Spotify account. It definitely has improved. And "obscure" is being used loosely. I'm talking Soul On Ice Remix or Lin Que's Let It Fall kinda stuff.

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Re: Streaming music services comparison/recommendations

Post by Hush »

I am digging Beats Music so far. One glaring feature that is missing is the ability to add tracks to the currently playing queue. So if you think of a song you want to hear next you can't "play next" or add to the end of the current queue, you would have to stop listening to the current playlist or album and switch to that song.

Phila, I'm following your TROY account on Spotify and I enjoyed your "Check the Vibes" playlists.

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Post by ChaMerZ »

Philaflava wrote:I got tons of obscure shit on my Spotify account. It definitely has improved. And "obscure" is being used loosely. I'm talking Soul On Ice Remix or Lin Que's Let It Fall kinda stuff.
but this is Spotify's doing right? you didn't have to personally upload the content?

really wish i had spotify now so that i could glance at these enigmatic "check the vibes" playlists
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Post by ChaMerZ »

http://preview.grooveshark.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

new grooveshark design looks sexy. let's hope the music discovery will get a boost too.
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Post by alpha »

Been happily paying the $10 month for rdio for over 6
Months. Holla if you got any questions.

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Re: Streaming music services comparison/recommendations

Post by Hush »

alpha wrote:Been happily paying the $10 month for rdio for over 6
Months. Holla if you got any questions.
Why is it your service of choice?

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Post by Y@k Bollocks »

We have a Spotify account, but I also keep all my MP3s on a NAS drive. When I search for an album, it searches Spotify and my MP3s so I just play it from wherever.

The Spotify account is in my wife's name, so I can't use the offline feature but I'm cool with loading MP3s onto my iPhone.

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Post by ChaMerZ »

Sounds like a cool set up.
Y@k Bollocks wrote:I also keep all my MP3s on a NAS drive.
How large is the drive?
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Post by Y@k Bollocks »

Yeah, it works really well. The drive is 2TB. Its one of those Western Digital My Cloud drives. Sits under a shelf and I basically forget that it's there.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1140" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Also stores all my downloaded films which I can stream to my AppleTV. You can also access stuff remotely, so handy if you're in a hotel and want to watch a movie on your iPad or something.

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Re: Streaming music services comparison/recommendations

Post by Hush »

Even though Beats is kind of cool I can't really see myself switching from Spotify for the long term. Still planning on trying out Rdio once the Beats trial ends though.

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Re: Streaming music services comparison/recommendations

Post by Hush »

ChaMerZ wrote:
Philaflava wrote:I got tons of obscure shit on my Spotify account. It definitely has improved. And "obscure" is being used loosely. I'm talking Soul On Ice Remix or Lin Que's Let It Fall kinda stuff.
but this is Spotify's doing right? you didn't have to personally upload the content?

really wish i had spotify now so that i could glance at these enigmatic "check the vibes" playlists
Anybody with a free Spotify account can listen to them:

https://play.spotify.com/user/opinionatedjay

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Post by ChaMerZ »

Hush wrote:
ChaMerZ wrote:
Philaflava wrote:I got tons of obscure shit on my Spotify account. It definitely has improved. And "obscure" is being used loosely. I'm talking Soul On Ice Remix or Lin Que's Let It Fall kinda stuff.
but this is Spotify's doing right? you didn't have to personally upload the content?

really wish i had spotify now so that i could glance at these enigmatic "check the vibes" playlists
Anybody with a free Spotify account can listen to them:

https://play.spotify.com/user/opinionatedjay
Spotify doesn't work for us Canucks. What's the other famous one ... ? Oh yea, also we don't have Hulu. There's actually a lot of stuff you guys have that we don't have.
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Post by ChaMerZ »

Y@k Bollocks wrote:Yeah, it works really well. The drive is 2TB. Its one of those Western Digital My Cloud drives. Sits under a shelf and I basically forget that it's there.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1140" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Also stores all my downloaded films which I can stream to my AppleTV. You can also access stuff remotely, so handy if you're in a hotel and want to watch a movie on your iPad or something.
that's balla dude. i bet all your locally stored mp3s are tagged with the utmost precision too.

i want a set up like that too. does it tax your network to always be streaming stuff from your drive? also, how fast is it? like say you have a hd movie there, could you just stream it easily? could multiple people do it at once?

for some reason the wifi at my crib is :shittylikesometp: i tried having a similar set up in the past but it was just too fukkin slow having to stream movies and music and stuff. idk
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Post by Y@k Bollocks »

ChaMerZ wrote:that's balla dude. i bet all your locally stored mp3s are tagged with the utmost precision too.

i want a set up like that too. does it tax your network to always be streaming stuff from your drive? also, how fast is it? like say you have a hd movie there, could you just stream it easily? could multiple people do it at once?

for some reason the wifi at my crib is :shittylikesometp: i tried having a similar set up in the past but it was just too fukkin slow having to stream movies and music and stuff. idk
Hell yeah - all tagged with cover art. Sold/binned/archived all of my CDs so went through all of them and re-ripped everything at 320 too.

It's pretty fast. Music is instant, movies usually take a little while to buffer. I downloaded a 1080p copy of Heat the other night and it was about 20gig - that took about 15-20 seconds to start playing, and can be a bit laggy if you pause it or fwd/rwd. Bit generally works perfectly. I use this app on my iPad and an AppleTV 3. Really great - http://firecore.com/infuse" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Not tried multiple people doing it. Will test it out!

And yeah, fast wifi is key. I recently changed to fibre optic and it's great. That set up didn't work when I had regular broadband.

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Post by Hush »

An update on Beats:

I have one day of trial left and so far I really like it, but I'm not sure it will replace Spotify.

I like that it learns your tastes through liking/disliking songs regardless of if you're listening to a playlist/album/radio, any time you are listening to a song, you are able to like/dislike it. This is something that Spotify only allows you to do on their radio feature, and it doesn't have a cumulative effect on your overall listening habits.

Another cool little feature is the ability to add your own album artwork to playlists you create. I was able to do a Google image search on my phone, save an image and easily add it to the playlist in the app.

The problems I see are a lot of the playlists it recommends will have one or two songs that I "liked" previously and a bunch of stuff I'm familiar with but don't really want to hear so I find myself skimming over the track lists of a lot of playlists and finding them to be "meh". Perhaps I haven't given it enough time to cater to my tastes.

I also don't like how to you can't queue songs on the fly. All listening is based around albums, playlists curated by their staff, or playlists you previously created yourself. If you're with a group of people and you put some music on shuffle, you can't 'take requests' and add them to the currently playing queue.

Then there's "The Sentence", which is their 'radio'. You fill in four blanks to create a sentence and then it plays music based on those criteria. An example would be "I'm in the car and feel like relaxing with myself to hip-hop". The underlined parts are the parts that you fill in from a list of predetermined variables. The idea is the playlist changes based on your location/mood/who you're with/chosen genre. I find that this feature plays some pretty obscure stuff, which is good, but not when you just want to hear some stuff you may be familiar with. I also wish there was a way to mix genres.

I may switch for a couple of months and see how it goes. Still waiting on that Rdio review from alpha...

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Post by Hush »

So I did sign up for Beats. It may be worth noting that when signing up there's an option to subscribe for a full year for $99.99, which is basically getting two months free. I went for the monthly option though because I'm finicky and could see myself switching to another service before the year is up.

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Re: Streaming music services comparison/recommendations

Post by Hush »

Hush wrote:So I did sign up for Beats. It may be worth noting that when signing up there's an option to subscribe for a full year for $99.99, which is basically getting two months free. I went for the monthly option though because I'm finicky and could see myself switching to another service before the year is up.
Switching back to Spotify because I was tired of seeing "Mario Lopez's Work Out Mix" on Beats' recommended playlists.

Edit: Actually just signed up for the 30 day trial of Rdio.

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Post by ChaMerZ »

Hush wrote:
Hush wrote:So I did sign up for Beats. It may be worth noting that when signing up there's an option to subscribe for a full year for $99.99, which is basically getting two months free. I went for the monthly option though because I'm finicky and could see myself switching to another service before the year is up.
Switching back to Spotify because I was tired of seeing "Mario Lopez's Work Out Mix" on Beats' recommended playlists.
LMAO.

I'm still good with DL'ing the few albums I want to listen to.

I like to listen to a few albums at a time (& for an extended period of time). If there's too much variation in what I listen to in a short span of time, then I can't properly absorb any of it.
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Post by Hush »

Does Rdio on iOS seem sluggish to anyone else? Getting it to start playing something and skipping tracks just seems slow compared to the snappiness of Spotify or Beats.

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Post by Hush »

Anyone else doing the three month trial of Apple Music?

It's basically Beats + iTunes mashed together.

The best features from Beats remain intact, like the human curated playlists and recommendations based on your listening habits.

You also basically get the iTunes Match service included for the 9.99/month subscription price. If you enable iCloud library in your iTunes desktop client, it will scan your existing library of music, matching what it can with songs already in the Apple Music library and uploading everything it can't find a match for to iCloud so you can stream those tracks to your iphone/ipad. This sounds great in theory, but there have been numerous reports of it screwing up people's libraries, mismatching some songs, etc. It seems like it is recommended to back up your library before enabling this feature.

To get around those issues I've moved my entire iTunes folder to a different location on my hard drive, and then relaunched iTunes and it created a brand new library with no music in it. I checked the option to copy music I add to this new library to the new iTunes Media folder (so it won't mess with the copy I moved). Now, I'm dragging and dropping individual songs/albums into this new library from my original iTunes folder. This way, I can pick and choose what gets uploaded to iCloud bit by bit, rather than letting it mangle my entire library all at once. I've already ran into a few issues... I uploaded The Beatnuts self titled album (or "Street Level") and it matched the Intro with the Intro from "Take it or Squeeze It" rather than upload the proper version. It also matched "Props Over Here" with the same song from their greatest hits album (which is less of a big deal, since at least it's the same song). Hopefully they will implement a way to correct these mistakes or allow you to force the upload of a song if you know its been mismatched.

Other than these minor issues I'm liking it so far.

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Post by Hush »

Looks like Pandora is negotiating deals with record labels so they can jump into the on demand streaming market:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=pandora+on+demand" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Post by sleazy_j »

funny that even though artists say "spotify is raping us financially" other companies like Pandora decide "we should try streaming libraries also".

i just use Spotify and Google Play Music, of which GPM is mostly for uploading stuff not on Spotify.
i subscribed to YouTube Red also now for the ad skipping and offline / closed app playing on my phone.
and really I could get rid of Spotify since the Google Music store that I get access to from YouTube Red
is so similar, but sometimes I like using Spotify's "Discover Weekly" so I keep Spotify.

a few months back I messed around and found a way to find and subscribe to random "Discover Weekly" playlists from random Spotify user accounts; interesting stuff there.

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Post by Hush »

sleazy_j wrote:funny that even though artists say "spotify is raping us financially" other companies like Pandora decide "we should try streaming libraries also".

i just use Spotify and Google Play Music, of which GPM is mostly for uploading stuff not on Spotify.
i subscribed to YouTube Red also now for the ad skipping and offline / closed app playing on my phone.
and really I could get rid of Spotify since the Google Music store that I get access to from YouTube Red
is so similar, but sometimes I like using Spotify's "Discover Weekly" so I keep Spotify.

a few months back I messed around and found a way to find and subscribe to random "Discover Weekly" playlists from random Spotify user accounts; interesting stuff there.
So YouTube Red and Google Music susbscriptions are one and the same? :ohhh:

I got tired of Spotify because unless there's a new album out that I'm checking for, I don't always like having to figure out exactly what I'm in the mood to listen to, and got tired of hearing the same old tracks on my playlists (and IMO, Spotify's radio feature sucks). I've started using Pandora free again for my commute to/from work and I'm waiting to see what their on-demand offering looks like. Having Pandora radio + the ability to stream stuff on demand would be the best of both worlds. Plus it would be awesome if you could save tracks from Pandora stations to playlists for revisiting later.

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Re: Streaming music services comparison/recommendations

Post by BigCat8 »

Hush wrote:So YouTube Red and Google Music susbscriptions are one and the same? :ohhh:
This has been the secret MVP of my Google Play Music subscription. Watching YouTube on Roku/Chromecast without ads has been a nice bonus.

That, and using my Google Play Rewards survey money to buy myself gift subscriptions to GPM. They ran a 50% off deal a while back. I haven't paid for a month since about December, and won't pay again until October.

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