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App Smart: Streaming for a Good Beat That’s Just to Your Taste

August 28, 2013 by NewsMaker

Since then, the music landscape has undergone a sea change. But discovering music in a similar way is still possible via the latest and fast-evolving trend in digital music: streaming.

Perhaps the best-known streaming music app is Spotify. This app lets you listen to any of your favorite tracks at will, and it is also a digital radio that streams new music. Its interface is simple, bordering on spartan: it has a main screen where you control the music you are hearing, and a menu screen that lets you access different sections of the app and adjust settings.

To listen to a track you simply choose “Search” and type the artist’s name or a word from the track’s title. Spotify then lists the results by artist, album and song title. A more interesting way to use the app, however, is to select the “Discover” option. This reveals a long graphics-heavy list containing all sorts of different music.

Some of this will be familiar (right now, my app is telling me “You’ve been listening to a lot of Daft Punk lately” and recommends one of their albums), some of it will be new. These tracks include new releases, and music that is popular or is being listened to by nearby Spotify users.

There’s also a “Radio” option that has “stations” that stream either a particular band’s music, or genres of your choice, from Alternative to Trance. The app has straightforward controls and will show you album art and even band biographies.

Spotify has changed how I listen to music. But while the app is free on iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8, using it may cost you. In the United States, you can listen to the app’s radio stations free, but to listen to specific tracks you’ll have to subscribe for $10 a month.

For a different experience, you might try Rhapsody (which in some places overseas goes under the Napster brand). As in Spotify, you can search for music you want to hear, or discover new music through a few different routes. For example, the Browse section breaks music into genres; inside each genre’s page you can choose from new releases or popular tracks.

Alternatively, you can find new music through Rhapsody’s home page, which offers access to featured music, new releases and popular tracks. There are also Playlists, which are a little like Spotify’s stations. These lists have a regularly updated selection of music that will stream to you. There are extras like album reviews, so you can learn more about the artist you’re listening to.

Rhapsody’s interface is graphically richer and feels easier to navigate than Spotify’s, thanks to features like its ever-present icon bar. Bu you may find that Rhapsody’s graphics and many settings get in the way of your listening experience. It’s free to download on iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8, but you’ll have to pay $10 a month for unlimited music streaming.

Last.fm was one of the first players that streamed music over the Internet, and now it’s available as an app. Instead of concentrating on giving you access to new music, a bit like traditional radio, Last.fm tries to recommend new music based on the tracks you already listen to. In fact, it monitors music that you play through your mobile device, and keeps a list of it in your profile — a trick it calls “scrobbling.”

The scrobbled list can be shared online and is used to recommend lists of music similar to the kind you already like. The data comes from other Last.fm users’ lists. Last.fm is powerful and entertaining, but its interface is more basic than its peers’ and it doesn’t quite have the same range of music discovery options. And, though the app is free on iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8, to listen to the recommended lists you have to pay $3 a month.

Finally, there’s SoundCloud, a free app for iOS and Android that offers a different kind of streaming music. Where Spotify is like having radio on your phone, SoundCloud is more about hearing new music shared by indie artists via a social network. It has a wonderfully simple interface and it’s fun to use — you can upload your own music and share that too. Just don’t expect to find mainstream rock bands on this app.

Hopefully, you’ll find tons of new music to listen to via these apps, but remember there are other options. The Pandora app is well known and definitely worth trying. Apple is also poised to introduce iTunes Radio — a free service with advertisements. Streaming music is a fast-changing scene, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for special offers.

Quick Call

Telenav Scout, a successful GPS navigation app that’s done well on Android and iOS, has finally hit Windows Phone 8 devices. The core app is free, but advanced features like red light alerts will cost you $25 a year.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/29/technology/personaltech/streaming-for-a-good-beat-thats-just-to-your-taste.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

State of the Art: The Cloud That Rains Music

Amazon, whose online music store competes with Apple’s, has two problems with that arrangement. First, your music library is messily scattered. When you buy a new song at home, you can’t listen to it at work, at least not without copying it manually. You might buy a song on your phone, but it won’t be on your computer until you do a sync. And if your music library is big, you can fit only a portion of it onto your phone.

Second, Amazon wishes more people would buy music from its store instead of iTunes.

This week, the online retailer took the wraps off a slick suite of software and services that solves both problems, and offers some sweet incentives for you to consider it.

Amazon’s big idea is that instead of sitting on your computer, your music collection will sit online ( or “in the cloud,” as hipsters insist on saying). That way, you can listen to it from any computer — at home, at work, at a friend’s — by logging into a special Web page called the Amazon Cloud Player.

You can also listen to anything in your music collection on an Android phone. No copying or syncing of music is ever required; all your songs are always available everywhere, and they don’t hog any storage on the phone itself.

The Cloud Player is a simple, clean, polished music-playback page that looks vaguely like iTunes. It’s dominated by a list of your songs, which you can sort and search. The album art shows up. You can drag songs into playlists. You can play back a song, album or playlist, complete with Shuffle and Repeat functions. You can download songs to your computer (they go directly into iTunes or Windows Media Player). Sound quality is excellent (the streaming is the full 256 kilobits a second of the original files, if you’re into that sort of statistic).

There’s a free Uploader app that lets you send your existing music files from your Mac or PC to that same online library, so those songs, too, are available from anywhere. The app is clever enough to preserve your songs and playlists the way you organized them in iTunes or Windows Media Player. (Just note that it recognizes only MP3 and AAC files — not ring tones, audio books or WAV files. Copy-protected songs need not apply.)

The app for Android phones is similar. It offers two big buttons: one for listening to your online music collection, and another for playing the music files that are actually on the phone. There’s no way to mix and match — to create a playlist containing some songs from each source, for example.

Amazingly enough, all of this is absolutely free.

Well, sort of.

Songs are pretty big files. That, after all, is one huge advantage of Amazon’s cloud idea: moving those hefty music files to the Internet frees up space on your computers and phones.

To get you started, Amazon offers everyone five gigabytes of free space online — enough room for about 1,200 MP3 songs. You can buy more storage; it costs $1 a gigabyte a year. If you have a 50-gigabyte song collection, for example, you’ll pay $50 a year. That can get awfully steep at the high end (like $1,000 for 1,000 gigabytes) — high enough to make “pay $15 a month for unlimited music” sites like Rhapsody look awfully appealing.

The storage is good for more than music files, though. Part II of the Amazon announcement is the Cloud Drive, an online hard drive a lot like the Apple iDisk or Microsoft SkyDrive.

On this virtual drive, you can store anything at all: photos, Office documents — anything you might like to back up or to retrieve later from any other computer. Even if you never use any of Amazon’s music features, having this five-gigabyte drive online is a pleasant surprise, free to anyone who wants it. (You can view the photos and play the music you’ve stored there, but otherwise, it’s just a place for parking files, not opening them.)

Amazon takes the sting out of its storage prices with some special offers. For example, if you buy an album from Amazon’s music store, your Cloud Drive gets bumped up to 20 gigabytes for the year — no charge.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9525c0034f32b935bdd650fb7ca5b8ea

App Smart: Streaming for a Good Beat That’s Just to Your Taste

State of the Art: The Cloud That Rains Music

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