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Spotify Challenges iTunes With iPod Support, Playlist Synching
Stoobalou writes with this excerpt from thinq.co.uk: "Spotify has made a surprise announcement, and while it's still not the long-awaited US launch, it will be making a splash over the pond: the streaming music service is morphing into an iTunes competitor. In what is a clear attempt at rattling Apple's cage, Spotify has unveiled a pair of major new features: the ability to synchronise Spotify playlists with iPods, and the option to buy MP3 files to own — both key features of the iTunes platform. Any playlist created via the Spotify player can be downloaded in a single step, making 'digital mix-tape' creation significantly simpler."
So Spotify is the next company which will be sued by Apple.
In love, war and slashdot discussions, everything is allowed.
in 3...2...1...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Being able to buy an entire playlist, instead of one tune at a time, is though. Just to clarify.
Brilliant. Now Apple will change up their iPod authentication again, resulting in even worse support for those of us who use free software.
Competition = Good.
It gives us customers a better chance to finally get what we want!
I am a Spotify premium customer, because it gives me access to lots of streaming music on my iPod. However, they are not an iTunes competitor. Their catalog is no where near iTunes in comprehensiveness. For many somewhat popular songs (try, for instance, finding the original "MacArthur park" the only results you get are a zillion bad karaoke albums, or covers. They have lots of random crap though. They are not really a competitor to iTunes, but rather a complement to it.
iPods (and apparently all Apple devices) munge filenames on the devices so that you are forced to install a music management application like iTunes. Apple chose not to follow the standard that every other device manufacturer was using and went their own proprietary route.
Aren't those features of, well, pretty much any online music store at all, such as Amazon?
With Amazon I can buy mp3s, and syncing mp3s to my player is not a function of the damn store I bought it from! Drag and drop through USB mass storage has been around forever - I was doing that on my old IRiver player back ages ago.
I don't understand stories like this. Mp3s can be bought in a million and four ways, and syncing them to my own devices (although I don't own an iPod) has been possible for as long as there have been mp3s at all. What's the big deal here? If something today couldn't do that, it means it was behind basic functionality of the early 1990s.
Note to most Slashdotters - almost every time you stamp your feet declaring something unnewsworthy, you're usually missing something.
The key point here is that it syncs with iPods. Not "MP3 Players", not to a USB Mass Storage Device, but to an actual honest to goodness iPod. Amazon doesn't do that, specifically because iPods use a proprietary sync routine and can't be synced like most other players.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Itunes' (and other softwares') "organising media crap" amounts to the software creating and managing a bunch of directories on disk for you. I'd respectfully submit that anybody who's managing their music collection by manually creating and shuffling folders around, and manually updating filenames should turn in their self-congratulatory geek card.
I'm pretty sure being someone "with brains" amounts to more than "right click -> new folder..." or "cd ~/music; mkdir 'The Beatles'", and doing that a thousand times doesn't make you any more of a geek than doing it once. In fact, insisting on doing something manually which is adequately, consistently, and automatically performed by software would tend to make you a luddite.
WRT to your follow-up to your own post: perhaps some perspective would be helpful when you find yourself getting "angry" over the opinions other people share about a piece of media playback software? The submit button will still be there after you've proofed your comments, and spewing bile doesn't generally make people more likely to want to spend time reading your opinions.
Wrong. When I buy MP3s from Amazon, they automatically show up in iTunes. There's even a folder called ~/Music/iTunes Media/Automatically Add to iTunes/ and... (wait for it) anything that you or any program puts there will wind up in iTunes.
ANY music service can EFFORTLESSLY sync this way.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
What is it with the tech people and the monkey moniker? I mean, if I'm going to setup a new test box the first thing that comes to mind for a PC name is testmonkey, and I'm not the only one around here that does that. "Allright! Who has testmonkey!?" Discuss.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Spotify isn't an online music store; it started out as a music streaming service. They are actually doing very well, I've been using Spotify for over a year now and can't even imagine going back to anything else. The Spotify client allows me to purchase mp3's, manage my local library which I ripped from my CD's, and gives me a mind bogglingly huge array of music ready to sream at any time.
I strongly recommend you give it a try. Dont listen to the naysayers; people who complain about the recent restrictions on free accounts should really consider that a subscription which grants [b]unlimited[/b] access costs $5/month.
No shit Sherlock - the operative word there is iTunes. You're still syncing through iTunes which negates your entire point. Until you have something that takes you away from iTunes completely then you haven't found a complete replacement.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Yes, Amazon's mp3 downloader adds the file to iTunes, and iTunes syncs it to your iPod/iPhone.
Spotify is cutting out that step and syncing directly; you won't need iTunes at all.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I'm with you... I can't stand these "modern" media players that insist on bossing your library around, when good old Winamp does its singular job perfectly. I use a spreadsheet-style ID3 tagger on any new acquisitions, which also moves them into directories according to genre/artist/album.
That said, I'm also importing some tags into a MySQL DB, which feeds a simple PHP site where I can search and spit out playlists. Very handy if I'm at a friend's house since I can easily stream tunes from home. I suppose Ampache does something similar, but I just rolled my own.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The problem with all that automated software is they lack configurability or interoperability. Maybe I like having my folders arranged a certain way. Maybe I store my music on a file server, and I want the parsing/sorting/searching to happen server-side. Or, maybe, just maybe, I like the fact that Winamp does one thing and does it well. It has a compact, functionality-driven interface. It loads up instantly, even with thousands-long playlists. CPU usage is minimal, and its plugin architecture lets me extend it to new formats and sound APIs such as ASIO, taking advantage of my pro audio gear.
Think of it as an application of "the Unix way": simple, single purpose tools strung together to create something that works efficiently while being tailored to each user's tastes. You just can't do that with these giant monolithic media-whoring behemoths.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Well, yes. It is rather lame that in 2011 you still can't map a drive to your iPod and copy files over, but that's Apple for you.
That said, munging file names is not always a bad thing. I do that with my own music collection, rather than fussing with funky characters in file names. I extract the ID3 tags to a database, then rename the file to match the row ID. If, by some disaster, I were to lose that database, I can always batch-rename the files according to their ID3 tags.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Apple only blocks their software from working with other people's hardware (Palm syncing with iTunes) or if the software turns their hardware into a commodity (Flash on iOS.) Once you buy their hardware, they couldn't care less if you use non-apple software.
In fact both your points are right.
The fail is with filesystems, I know I will get a lot of flack form the filesystem guy's but it's their fault for not developing a way to maintain metadata in a ubiquitous way, a media player should just be a overlay on top of the filesystem used to view and the OS should manage the metadata not individual applications.
How it work with iTunes,WMP,Amarok, etc. it's kludgy at best, having to keep the data and metadata in separate databases.
I keep my music is top notch order with album art embedded in the ID3 tag. So it's portable and because I hate having lose pictures in my dirs. But if I load my music with different player there's always a bit of metadata missing.
The beast manager I found before I got an iPhone was Jajuk but it was written in Java so I despise it more that iTunes.
I propose a new file format, like the bundles concept in OS X, just plonk all the data raw in a dirs, give it an extension, like .album, show me the album art as a thumbnail and have the info in an XML file. we could use compressed achieves like rar or zip to be cross-platfrom. They did the same with comic books, the CBR/CBZ are just rar and zip files treated differently, it keeps the raw file for easy editing, a lot more elegant then PDFs.
Of course Spotify does not benefit musicians - after all, it is owned in part by the Big Four record companies... Spotify thus especially screws indie labels not in their slave pens.
So what I do is I listen to old music on Spotify, and discover new music there - which I then proceed to buy on iTunes. The latter would have been a blessing to indie artists if it weren't for the requirement that you have to go through a record label - but cdbaby and magnatune come to the rescure there I guess.
So: Spotify has value to musicians because it provides "free" advertising. The listeners can then go and buy the actual music. But do we really want to keep letting the layers between artist and consumer siphon off their "take" much longer?
True, streams usually pay only a cent or less but where did you get the iTunes royalty figure? Depending on location I get up to $0.64 per track. If your 5 pence is correct at all, it must be that the record companies are keeping the balance of the royalty. I think your gripe should be with the record companies, not the didgital download and streaming services.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Yes you can, at least in iTunes.
Preferences > Advanced > uncheck "keep iTunes Media folder organised"
Then it behaves exactly like Winamp if you want to do all the folder and music management yourself.
... will it work outside the United States?
If it behaved exactly like Winamp, I'd still keep using Winamp, because it's an order of magnitude faster than iTunes.
-Billco, Fnarg.com