Spotify – the next generation
Spotify – the next generation talks about the just released update to Spotify with new social features like Facebook integration, integrated local tracks and music sharing. The following video gives a brief overview of the new features.
XBMC and Spotify
XBMC is a superb media center application for your Home Theatre PC, and thanks to OpenSpotify it is now possible to do all sorts of integration — for instance integrating Spotify in XBMC!
The project is called spotyxbmc so just download it and try it out. It is built from the latest XBMC release so you should be good, just copying over your user profile.
Cool features include the ability to import Spotify albums into your own music library, which blurs the lines between local and remote music in a beautiful way. It is also possible to browse your playlists and the various top lists. Just one thing, it requires a Premium Spotify account.
Remember that this is alpha, so it does crash occasionally. Fortunately, just restart xbmc and you are good to go.
“Lips” playlist in Spotify
To rival the Singstar empire, Lips was recently released for Xbox 360. It’s a great game and it has lots of songs. More songs can be downloaded from the Xbox Market Place.
I added all default songs to a Spotify playlist so you can listen them all. This is for the Swedish release of the game, since the songs are sure to differ depending on the intended market. Enjoy!
iPhone app: Tap Tap Revenge
It’s time for the first iPhone game to be featured here. The game is called Tap Tap Revenge and is a music game in the spirit of Guitar Hero. The graphics are great and with the recent update, the game has become far more stable and a lot faster.
The most welcome feature in the game is definitely the online play capability. In this mode, one can battle many players in three different difficulty modes. If you don’t have the song being played in the current room, it will be downloaded automatically. This works very well, as long as the song download isn’t interrupted.
You will definitely have lots of fun for hours with this game, it’s free and available in the App store! There is really no excuse for not trying this game.
Spotify — the future of music
Spotify, now in public beta, takes a whole new approach to music. All music resides on the Spotify servers, and as a user, you stream the music using the internet.
Where it gets interesting is that you can either pay a fixed fee and listen all music you want without any interruptions. There is also a free option, where short commercial messages are inserted between songs in intervals which seem to be around half an hour.
Since the software is in public beta, you need an invite to use the service. If I happen to have an invite, I will of course share it with commenters to this post. There is another option though — paying for the service for a month. If you like the service after using it for a month, just continue paying or terminate the subscription. Your account will then become a free account, and you can continue to use Spotify, but with the ads injected.
There is a Windows and Mac client available at this moment. There have been reports that the Windows version works fine in Linux using Wine, so definitely try it out.
So how does is look like? The following view shows what is new in Spotify.
The next image shows the top list. This can be customised to only show a specific country or the whole world.
The main album view looks like the following. On the top, there are five top hits for that particular artist. It is followed by all albums available, and singles follow. The next section is devoted to albums where the current artist has one or more tracks, which are highlighted.
I have some suggestions to make Spotify even better (in no particular order):
- Last.FM integration.
- Music browser (browse by genre, year, artists etc.).
- Mechanism to correct faulty tags.
- Social part where users can share songs, playlists and watch each others listening habits.
- iPhone application
Some of these points seem to be in progress right now, but time will have to tell what will happen in the future when the services goes mainstream, which I am sure they will, as long as they can provide a smooth service without interruptions and errors.
Trying out GarageBand
Being a Mac user, I of course have iLife installed, but GarageBand is one application which I haven’t tried out — until now.
[audio:http://johnny.chadda.se/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/my-song.mp3|titles=My Song]
GarageBand makes it super easy to create your own song even if you can’t play any instruments. There are hundreds of free high quality samples to choose from if there is need. There are also external Jam packs which extends the basic package to include vocals and other instruments.
I created this song in a matter of minutes. The samples are of course from the bundled library, but it’s very easy to record and arrange your own instruments. Yes, the vocal track is empty. I thought I’d spare your ears.