Spotify goes Offline

No, they’re not closing down! 🙂

If you’re a mobile broadband user and own an Android or iPhone you have surely tried out Spotify Mobile.

Spotify mobile brings us 4,825,130 tracks (as of 2nd October 09) right to our very pockets, with the key ability of being able to listen to playlists offline – great if you’re on the move with your favourite playlist and lose wi-fi connection.

Spotify announced yesterday that they are bringing this cool little feature to our computers for premium users, another great reason to sign up and support them. People using this feature will be allowed to sync 3,333 tracks to their computer, allowing them to listen to anyone of these tracks without needing to be online.

There seemed to be a lot of out-cry from free users when this was announced, but personally I like to see this as a bonus to people who are already paying for the service.

Spotify is still 100% optionally free for the computer, and none of the premium advantages are extremely essential. The only one that might come near being essential is the mobile version, but this is more than worth the £10 per month. Since Spotify was launched they have only made it better and better, with free accounts remaining exactly the same.

With Spotify taking on paypal payments recently, it’s becoming easier and easier to access the premium service and the mind blowing 5 million songs in your pocket.

To sync your play list, you can either left click the playlist and find the on/off button in the top right corner, or right click the playlist itself and click ‘Available Offline’.

Any thoughts from free users and premium users are welcome.

You can find more information and discussion on the Spotify Blog.

Bonus to people who like Air (I do!):

French duo Air are set to release their sixth studio album later this month. The new album, Love 2, is the first production recorded at their own facility, Atlas Studio. Starting today Spotify Premium subscribers in Sweden can listen to the album. For a taste of the new album check out the first single Sing Sang Sung.

And don’t forget to keep on eye on our pre-release playlist to see all the current premium exclusives.

I hope to see this on UK Spotify soon, as I’m a big fan.

Engineer is Spy, AKA Gmail dies.

How do.

So, Gmail died yesterday. Anyone else get caught by it? I was out waiting to get into the cinema at the time, checking all my accounts which are linked to Gmail (trying out the new mobile broadband that I mentioned before). Oops.

I figured it was the phone at the time, and left it for the day. I just checked and found out it was an engineer’s error:

“This isn’t in itself a problem – we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline,” he said.

However, said Mr Treynor, engineers “slightly underestimated” the increased load put on other parts of the system during the upgrades, causing the “widespread outage” of its webmail.

Luckily I do have hotmail as a backup, and I’ve actually started to use hotmail for my forum etc sign ups. I prefer Gmail for my phones email though, hotmail is a little “clunky” on a phones browser. According to the article, both Yahoo and Hotmail are still ahead of Gmail on the number of people using it for email. I imagine this would be due to a lot of people using MSN messenger/IE as their default still.

However, Gmail did have something to say:

“Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologise to all of you – today’s outage was a big deal, and we’re treating it as such.”

I wonder how many people were actually affected?