Funny, I was listening yesterday, and find I don't mind the voiceover ads at all. Of course one is conditioned to that from years of radio listening. It's just when a different type of song starts playing out of the blue that is jarring...like someone flipping the radio dial on you.
That's intertesting Doofy - we don't seem to get the change of music at all and the ads just happen. To me they seem to be less often than radio, so I don't mind at all.
Based on Germanprof's excellent tip, I made a playlist of albums from my SFL list. So far I have not minded the occasional ad either, though I agree the ads are so far removed from anything I would buy.
For those on Spotify, check out the Spotify Playlist Generator. Give it an artist and a few minutes, and this little Windows app will generate a playlist of related artists. I gave it Bob Dylan (an easy one to start with), and got quite a few decently related artists (Woody Guthrie, Blind Willie McTell), but also The Who (Baba O'Reily?) and a few duplicates (Elvis Costello, Allison, two dif versions). A few oddities turn up (Johnny Cash is an obvious good choice, but Personal Jesus is not the best Cash song related to Dylan....or is it?)
Still, a pretty good list of music in just about a minute.
I got Spotify just last night, and it's already stored about 168 MB in my C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Spotify\Storage\86 folder. That seems like a lot, doesn't it?
I'm checking now to see if it plays commercials when I'm only playing local files... if so, I'll probably uninstall it fairly quickly. (Otherwise, I might actually buy in.)
It would be nice if there were a command to shuffle and re-shuffle playlists, but relatively few people would use something like that... and since you can copy playlists both in and out as text, I could just script that myself I guess. O noticed that if you put an HTML comment tag in after the Spotify URI, it still works - so with something like the Playlist Generator above, you could ID the tracks inline with the copied/dragged text, in case if you want to prune/manipulate them before they go in.
I also noticed that it monitors the current volume on your sound-card/mapper, so that when you try to mute the commercials, it pauses them. Fiendishly clever, that - do other ad-supported streaming services do this too? Like many of you, I probably wouldn't mind the commercials if they were targeted to my actual listening preferences, but for now I'll probably just swap the minimalist/cheapo amp I use with the computer for the nice(r) receiver in the other room, which has a remote control. (They'll probably figure out a way to monitor that too, but until then, you just have to keep playing the game.)
hey, i just got an invitation. but i'm afraid that if i create an account, i'll wind-up with some intrusive spyware or a player that messes-up my emusic download manager or makes the spotify player -- rather than my itunes platform -- my default player.
am i being paranoid? any advice greatly appreciated.
Interesting, I can turn commercials down (XP) with the slider in the client, That was an in-house one. I'll see what happens the next time the Col. shows up to hawk Coke. I didn't try to mute it completely.
Ok. Just got a commercial, in house I think. I can confirm that even turning down the wave input pauses the commercial. It seemed like moving it up slightly unpaused it so next time I'll turn it down to 0 and nudge it up just a bit.
Science marches on! You can turn the volume down all the way if you do it in several steps. Try this:
Play a commercial from your Play Queue History. Slide the volume down about 30 % of the remaining scale. Let go of the slider. Repeat. If the commercial pauses, slide it up slightly until it starts again. When you get down to around 20% you can hold the down arrow key to go lower. Attempting to drag here pauses it.
Dang, I wonder how much they paid some poor sap to figure out how to get it to do that? Jeez, they've probably got thousands of lines of code dedicated to making it react to volume-control changes. No wonder they had to make it a desktop app.
I wonder how long before Hulu starts doing this...
Daniel - Spotify wants to be your default and wants you to sink your iPod with it, but it does ask for permission. Don't know about spyware, but I think if that was an issue the internet would be blowing its top right now.
Dr. Mutex - Do you get through your system before the commercial ends?
cafreema - 3/4 through is my best time. I get better results by reaching over and turning down the speakers.
edit: The software bremble mentioned works. XP needs to use System Mute. I wouldn't use it all the time, but I think it's great for albums where the tracks flow together and having something shoved in the middle would ruin it. Of course, a pause isn't so hot either, but it's better than being blasted with a Rap track in the middle of a Prog album. The pause could be taken out too, if you were willing to wait to start listening while your software built up a buffer of played tracks. One average-length track is probably sufficient since they seem to limit the ads to a minute total.
edit1: ScissorMan. I have no doubt they made it a desktop app (it's actually a captive IE browser) so they could control the ads and keep you from skipping them. They said as much about the Linux client, it's Premium-only because they haven't found a way to lock it down on Linux. Good luck with that one, on an OS predicated on the idea that it's the user's computer, and the user should be in control.
Anyone subscribed at the free level hit 10 hours? I honestly think I listened to more than 10 hours the last few weeks. It's of course a new month now, so it doesn't matter much.
okay thanks guys. I can see where $5 month might be worth unlimited streaming.
Anymore with such a large music collection, it seems like after a few months or maybe up to a year, an album has to be catchy to merit much repeat listening unless it comes up on shuffle.
Has anyone noticed a pattern of incomplete albums being up, meaning albums missing a track or more, or the opposite, just one track available? I've noticed this with Deutsche Grammophon Albums like the Emerson Quartet's "Intimate Letters" Janacek/Martinu Quartets is missing the last track. Then since it's $5 this month on Amazon: Beethoven: Symphonies Nos.5 & 7 Wiener Philharmoniker, just one track is available on Spotify.
[Disclaimer: I'm not against spotify, just not willing to accept its benefits without questioning its other effects]
Realized today that since getting spotify free I am spending time listening to SFL albums and some old missed-at-the-time classics that I was until recently spending listening to new artists on bandcamp. Wouldn't want that to become a permanent trend.
so i activated my spotify account. a few initial observations:
i'm scared that having spotify will somehow mess up my emusic-to-itunes connection. we'll see, i guess.
i immediately knew the first album i wanted to stream: destroyer's kaputt. after that, i'm hard-pressed to find stuff i want to hear and can't get on emusic. maybe that's a reflection of the fact that this has been a relatively quiet year for top-shelf releases from the "major-indies" (again, except for kaputt). who knows.
the stuff i did want beyond kaputt -- discs from small, cassette-only type labels -- isn't on spotify, either.
i hate the commercials.
the interface is sleek and pleasing. but, like itunes, the lack of good editorial content is a turn-off for me.
i still want to own -- not stream -- my music.
i read that indie labels make next-to-nothing per stream. iirc, it takes thousands upon thousands of streams for an indie label to make even a few dollars from spotify. but there they all are: matador, merge, beggars, domino. if they're willing to be on spotify, i do not understand why they won't return to emusic, where their returns have to be better. i suppose the counterargument is that, unlike the download model, the label/artist gets some money every time a song or album is streamed, so the amount they receive over a fan's lifetime of listening and re-listening to a song or album might equal what they're paid from an emusic download. in theory, that could be true, but it requires a leap of faith that i doubt has much validity.
anyway, if anyone's found amazing stuff on spotify that isn't on emusic (beyond the "major indies," i mean), please post it. i want to explore this service, but i'm kind of stuck for ideas on what to stream next. thanks.
i mean, let me add that -- if emusic doesn't adopt some type of full-album streaming system for subscribers -- i can see using spotify and emusic together, for albums that i'm unsure i want to download. also, looking at the nice spotify interface reminds me that emusic needs to upgrade its look.
I'm not sure this would qualify as not being a major-indie, but the Envy Corps' Dwell has never been on eMu, despite it being a Mercury Records release, but it's on Spotify. That's the only anomaly I've seen so far (and it's mostly an eMu anomaly, I suspect). Admittedly, I haven't been looking so hard for anomalies...
Also, if you like French guitar-pop bands from the 90's, there's an album by Affaire Louis Trio on Spotify - a band that eMu has apparently never heard of, though I wouldn't call it an "anomaly." (Most people would call it "who gives a f*ck.")
Meanwhile, I'm really liking the Destroyer album, which I probably wouldn't have checked out if you hadn't seemed so enthusiastic about it - so, thanks! Nice saxophones.
For me, Spotify is the new Lala. I use it to preview albums I'm thinking about buying. It helped me realized how crazy I am for Beirut's The Flying Club Cup. Even if it goes out of business tomorrow, I'll consider it a success for that alone. I can't imagine I'll ever pay for the service, but I'm happy to use however many free hours they give me (I hear it's 20 the first six months and then goes down to 10, with you being allowed to play each song up to five times; not bad for a preview service; Lala was one time each).
Comments
Still, a pretty good list of music in just about a minute.
I'm checking now to see if it plays commercials when I'm only playing local files... if so, I'll probably uninstall it fairly quickly. (Otherwise, I might actually buy in.)
It would be nice if there were a command to shuffle and re-shuffle playlists, but relatively few people would use something like that... and since you can copy playlists both in and out as text, I could just script that myself I guess. O noticed that if you put an HTML comment tag in after the Spotify URI, it still works - so with something like the Playlist Generator above, you could ID the tracks inline with the copied/dragged text, in case if you want to prune/manipulate them before they go in.
I also noticed that it monitors the current volume on your sound-card/mapper, so that when you try to mute the commercials, it pauses them. Fiendishly clever, that - do other ad-supported streaming services do this too? Like many of you, I probably wouldn't mind the commercials if they were targeted to my actual listening preferences, but for now I'll probably just swap the minimalist/cheapo amp I use with the computer for the nice(r) receiver in the other room, which has a remote control. (They'll probably figure out a way to monitor that too, but until then, you just have to keep playing the game.)
am i being paranoid? any advice greatly appreciated.
Ok. Just got a commercial, in house I think. I can confirm that even turning down the wave input pauses the commercial. It seemed like moving it up slightly unpaused it so next time I'll turn it down to 0 and nudge it up just a bit.
Play a commercial from your Play Queue History. Slide the volume down about 30 % of the remaining scale. Let go of the slider. Repeat. If the commercial pauses, slide it up slightly until it starts again. When you get down to around 20% you can hold the down arrow key to go lower. Attempting to drag here pauses it.
I wonder how long before Hulu starts doing this...
http://lifehacker.com/5825728/how-to-mute-ads-on-spotify
Dr. Mutex - Do you get through your system before the commercial ends?
Craig
edit: The software bremble mentioned works. XP needs to use System Mute. I wouldn't use it all the time, but I think it's great for albums where the tracks flow together and having something shoved in the middle would ruin it. Of course, a pause isn't so hot either, but it's better than being blasted with a Rap track in the middle of a Prog album. The pause could be taken out too, if you were willing to wait to start listening while your software built up a buffer of played tracks. One average-length track is probably sufficient since they seem to limit the ads to a minute total.
edit1: ScissorMan. I have no doubt they made it a desktop app (it's actually a captive IE browser) so they could control the ads and keep you from skipping them. They said as much about the Linux client, it's Premium-only because they haven't found a way to lock it down on Linux. Good luck with that one, on an OS predicated on the idea that it's the user's computer, and the user should be in control.
Update: I upgraded to Lion and it no longer works.
Craig
Anymore with such a large music collection, it seems like after a few months or maybe up to a year, an album has to be catchy to merit much repeat listening unless it comes up on shuffle.
Craig
Realized today that since getting spotify free I am spending time listening to SFL albums and some old missed-at-the-time classics that I was until recently spending listening to new artists on bandcamp. Wouldn't want that to become a permanent trend.
i'm scared that having spotify will somehow mess up my emusic-to-itunes connection. we'll see, i guess.
i immediately knew the first album i wanted to stream: destroyer's kaputt. after that, i'm hard-pressed to find stuff i want to hear and can't get on emusic. maybe that's a reflection of the fact that this has been a relatively quiet year for top-shelf releases from the "major-indies" (again, except for kaputt). who knows.
the stuff i did want beyond kaputt -- discs from small, cassette-only type labels -- isn't on spotify, either.
i hate the commercials.
the interface is sleek and pleasing. but, like itunes, the lack of good editorial content is a turn-off for me.
i still want to own -- not stream -- my music.
i read that indie labels make next-to-nothing per stream. iirc, it takes thousands upon thousands of streams for an indie label to make even a few dollars from spotify. but there they all are: matador, merge, beggars, domino. if they're willing to be on spotify, i do not understand why they won't return to emusic, where their returns have to be better. i suppose the counterargument is that, unlike the download model, the label/artist gets some money every time a song or album is streamed, so the amount they receive over a fan's lifetime of listening and re-listening to a song or album might equal what they're paid from an emusic download. in theory, that could be true, but it requires a leap of faith that i doubt has much validity.
anyway, if anyone's found amazing stuff on spotify that isn't on emusic (beyond the "major indies," i mean), please post it. i want to explore this service, but i'm kind of stuck for ideas on what to stream next. thanks.
Also, if you like French guitar-pop bands from the 90's, there's an album by Affaire Louis Trio on Spotify - a band that eMu has apparently never heard of, though I wouldn't call it an "anomaly." (Most people would call it "who gives a f*ck.")
Meanwhile, I'm really liking the Destroyer album, which I probably wouldn't have checked out if you hadn't seemed so enthusiastic about it - so, thanks! Nice saxophones.
Is "my music" the same thing as "any music I'd ever want to hear at least once"?