I've been adding Spotify apps that make it more useful, like last.fm and one called Tune Wiki that displays lyrics. I haven't yet found the app that makes it play the Beatles.
Interesting to see people using Spotify as a way of deciding whether to download albums - for some reason, I hadn't thought of it for that use. I probably made the mistake of thinking Spotify was some kind of personal jukebox, then giving up when I did a few searches for things it didn't have - I guess it is more useful for stuff that's coming out now than stuff that's older. I've just been offered Spotify for £4.99 a month as I have an NUS card - not sure if that is a good deal or not but I can't imagine wanting to pay just to stream stuff.
Yes, I'm still not at the stage of wanting to pay for it. It has been very useful for checking out things where the 30 second samples make me interested but unsure. The downside is if I listen to something too much on Spotify first to see if I want to buy it, then buying it is less fun.
I just saw this article that mentions Spotify Mobile is moving to work for all levels of users, in the US anyway. This sounds promising. I use Spotify regularly in front of my computer, but not enough to justify paying for it at this point.
You're correct, Dr. Mutex. Sorry about that. The article does mention Spotify doesn't have any current plans to bring this to other devices.
I also just received an email about this App and it sounds more like Pandora since it's a radio and sounds more like Pandora and less like Spotify in that you don't have as much control over what it plays.
@Rudie - I remember walking into record stores with my sisters and seeing the cassette racks lining all of the walls - and that didn't even cover the cassingles (sp?).
Wow that is so cool! I was in high school from '88-92, and I got my first cd player for high school graduation. I've always wondered why people didn't take about the tape era more, and now I see - you'd have to be almost exactly my age to experience the tape predominance. Just a little bit older, and you'd have stuck with records, and just a little bit younger, and you would have had a cd collection instead of a tape collection. But me and all my friends, it was always tapes, tapes, tapes.
I like the little blip for 8 track too; the first car I remember my parents having (an early '70s Chevy Nova) had an 8-track player in it.
@amc2 - yes you are probably right. Being older I tended to buy LPs and then record onto cassette to play in my car or walkman. I even did that when I first bought CDs. Having said that I did buy some pre-recorded cassettes as a few months ago I threw away perhaps twenty or thirty as even charity shops won't take them. I stuck, generally, with LPs rather than cassettes as my playback equipment was better quality, but quckly went ov er to Cds when they first appeared - yes I still have Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms, which at one early stage outsold all other CDs put together, as it was aboout one of only a handful of non classical CDs available.
@greg - that's pretty funny. From Wikipedia: A Rykodisc employee would subsequently write, "[In 1985 we] were fighting to get our CDs manufactured because the entire worldwide manufacturing capacity was overwhelmed by demand for a single rock title (Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms)."
Yes Thom. From memory there was only one CD plant in Europe back then in Germany - hard to imagine now. The expectation was that most early CDs sold would be classical, as those listeners would be more prepared to pay the premium to buy. But actually it was rock fans who invested in the equipment and there was so little around to play on it!
So was the "classical folk will buy CDs" expectation based on the notion that they tended to spend more on music, or be more willing to buy exxpensive music, or was it that those would be the people with the ears to appreciate the sound quality? If the latter, it's ironic that the pop/rock world then proceeded to fill millions of CDs with over-compressed sound.
It seems like some people (a lot of people?) actually like over-compressed sound. I was reading a review of Layla on amazon yesterday to see if I needed a better sound quality version - the top review was recommending the 40th anniversary version because it was louder and with a slightly smaller dynamic range than the prior version.
That perception is not surprising; any dominant production aesthetic trains the ears, and once you get used to a certain sound there's going to be a tendency to think things sound better if they sound that way.
Another angle is that, all else equal, louder generally sounds "better". With the typical listening situation moving to digital immediate-access (and often shuffle), unless users are deliberately volume-equalizing, older masterings will sound softer and therefore "worse". I expect many are not equalizing, so this would strike them as an apparent problem.
@amclark2 - Some people may, those people are called idiots.
Seriously, it has a lot to do with people not "replaygain-ing" their mp3s and then being annoyed that older music is quiet. It has more to do with laziness than anything...
I use Mp3Gain, which is an implementation of the ReplayGain standard. It's a process that measures the average volume of a track, and adjusts the header to specify a requested average volume. You can set to "album gain" (which sets the average volume of an album, retaining internal dynamics), or "radio gain", which treats every track separately and sets average volume. The latter is better if you primarily listen on shuffle.
It's basically a very useful tool to prevent you from adjusting the volume constantly if you have dynamic music in your library. Volume adjusting was driving me crazy before I started using it (which was probably 8-9 years ago).
I think I was surprised that someone who knew the term "dynamic range" would think it was a good thing to reduce it. I never really understood what dynamic range was until I read the Stylus loudness article, but still it doesn't sound like something you'd want to decrease.
I've never replay-gained anything, but I might find that useful for decreasing volume; sometimes my phone won't get quite as quiet as I'd like it too without cutting out completely.
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I also just received an email about this App and it sounds more like Pandora since it's a radio and sounds more like Pandora and less like Spotify in that you don't have as much control over what it plays.
I like the little blip for 8 track too; the first car I remember my parents having (an early '70s Chevy Nova) had an 8-track player in it.
Seriously, it has a lot to do with people not "replaygain-ing" their mp3s and then being annoyed that older music is quiet. It has more to do with laziness than anything...
It's basically a very useful tool to prevent you from adjusting the volume constantly if you have dynamic music in your library. Volume adjusting was driving me crazy before I started using it (which was probably 8-9 years ago).
I've never replay-gained anything, but I might find that useful for decreasing volume; sometimes my phone won't get quite as quiet as I'd like it too without cutting out completely.