SpotifiTunes – All Your iTunes Tracks on Spotify

To take a break from reviews, travel info for things like car rental and games, I thought it might be time to have a quick post about Spotify! The latest news hasn’t been too exciting; allowing us to buy tracks, a deal with 3 and lots of new songs. But what about those people who are new to Spotify?

You’ve just found Spotify, or maybe only heard about it. You’ll ‘if’ and ‘but’ for a few minutes about iTunes, until you realise it might be time to move on over to Spotify.

One of your ponderings might very well have been a good counterpoint to moving over though.

If you’re into music and are like me, you might have spent an inhuman amount of money and time on and with iTunes. Now it’s time to re-make your whole library on Spotify. Of course, this means that you’ll not only have to find the name of every song in your iTunes’ library, but you also have to type them all into Spotify, find them and then add them to playlists.

This is where SpotifiTunes comes in. Nope, it isn’t what would happen if iTunes and Spotify got busy with each other, it’s a much easier way to move from iTunes to Spotify. This involves uploading a file that contains the names of all your songs (automatically made by iTunes) and getting a page with links to all the search terms you’ll need. Much less typing, much more music.

The process is simple, and mostly painless:

1. Find your iTunes’ Music Library XML file, it can usually be found here:
   • Windows: \Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music Library.xml
   • Mac: /Users/username/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml
2. Upload the XML file at: http://spotifitunes.com/
3. The site will then return a list of all your songs, artists and albums with helpful links to a Spotify search of their names. For example: http://spotifitunes.com/marks
4. Click the links to find all of  your artists and songs.

You can also sign up to the site to access these extra features:

• Edit your library’s permalink
• Make your library private
• Delete your library
• Claim a library that you have already uploaded
• Adding/deleting artists from your library (coming soon)
• Editing artist links from Spotify searches to real links to the artist (coming soon)

SpotifiTunes playlist. Click for bigger

If you prefer using the mobile broadband version of Spotify, I’ve just had a look and you’re unable to choose a file to upload in Safari. The URL to open Spotify also doesn’t work. You can, however, see your SpotifiTunes’ playlists.

Spotify TV and Downloads

Spotify are going to be streaming free TV, you say? Well the good news for you is, I have no idea. Not to say I won’t be talking about it, just don’t expect it any time soon.

I was just snooping around t3.com and they mentioned it here:

Not content with jockeying iTunes from its music-providing pedestal, the innovative minds behind streaming music service Spotify have now set their sights on producing their own branded mobile phones and a Spotify television channel.

Speaking to tech website Crave, Spotify representatives said while ‘SpoTV’ is “some way off”, there are plans to look into the possibility, “to install Spotify on digital boxes at some point in the future”.

While there is no confirmation whether either the Spotify mobile phone or ‘SpoTV’ will be reaching UK shores anytime soon, the fact they chose to share their streaming wonder with us first, gives us hope they will do the same this time around.

Sounds pretty interesting, but what can it bring to the table that other services don’t provide?

Unlike the music market (which Spotify has taken the crown of) there are already a few services that offer free streaming television, for example: BBCi Player, 4od and TVCatchup.

There are probably a lot more than that, and a few that are exclusive to the USA also. I’m not going to mention illegal sites which stream movies and stuff, I’m talking about a legal way.

It mentions being used on digital boxes though… Does this mean we’ll be able to sit on our sofas and navigate through free streaming TV from our existing digi boxes? Quality of the stream and bandwidth comes to mind here. But I look forward to hear more about it.

Anyway, onto downloads. You might have noticed a new ‘Buy’ button displayed next to some of your Spotify tracks. Spotify have partnered up with 7digital to offer premium and free members alike the option for on the fly downloading, you can simply click ‘Buy’ and a submit form will pop up in Spotify asking you to enter your payment method. Simples!

Sadly it isn’t on the mobile broadband version of Spotify yet, but who knows?

While this isn’t particularly good news to Premium members,  (they can listen on iPhone/android and also sync playlists for offline use, which makes buying a track a bit redundant) free users now have an option other than subscribing to get access to songs on the go, which is good news.

A lot of premium members have been asking if the buy button could be optional, as it now takes up a whole column in Spotify, so we maybe seeing that soon. I would imagine it heavily depends on the agreement Spotify has with labels and 7digital – it might be in the agreement that every user has to be able to see the button, but that’s just speculation.

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• Spotify – better than iTunes for music purchases? (en.onsoftware.com)
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• Spotify Phone to Stream Music and TV Across Europe [Unconfirmed] (gizmodo.com)

Wakoopa.com, Social Networking and Software Discovery

Image via CrunchBase

While trying to decide what I wanted to write about today, I came upon this little tool which looked quite interesting: Wakoopa

I’m sorry to tell you this, but no, it doesn’t involve inflicting any kind of physical harm on Koopas.

What is it? Basically it’s a social networking site which allows you to monitor your software usage, and allows you to check out what other people are using. The site then recommends software, games and apps to you, depending on what you use. It’s a lot more fleshed out than what I write here; it has a massive amount of people reviewing software and has a fun little “levelling” system to encourage people to help each other out.

How is it done? First off, you need to sign up for an account. If you want an invite from me (which apparently gets me points, and everyone knows that points are totally awesome) leave a comment with your name and e-mail. I have to screen the comments, so no one will see your e-mail address, don’t worry. If, however, you don’t want to give me points, just go to the normal link and sign up there. Next, you download their tracker. It lets them record the amount of time you spend on any software, and some sites (for example, it’s recording how long I take to make a post on WordPress, oh god). After that, you can share, get recommendations for software you might like and find people who like or use the same software as you.

Smart phone tracking? If you have mobile broadband and a smart phone, you’re likely to use a lot of apps on the phone. I listen to Spotify on my iPhone for a good few hours at work, probably making it my most used app. I also use my phone a lot for e-mail and messengers. Apparently you’re supposed to be able to log onto their mobile website at i.wakoopa.com, but logging in doesn’t seem to work for me. This might be because I only signed up a few hours ago, but maybe it’s just broke? I’m not sure if you’re able to track what you use on your phone because of this.

I’ve just had a proper look around, and here’s an update on the iPhone version of this:

Image by John Swords via Flickr

Source

We released an iPhone version of Wakoopa which you can reach at http://i.wakoopa.com. There you could manually add the web applications you were using.

I must say it was more of a test and it’s no longer maintained.

Image by naesk via Flickr

Hey Joe,

We’re working on a new iphone client that’s a million times better than what we now offer, and that should be out real soon!

Cheers,
Kilian

Source

These messages, however, are from 3 months ago… Here’s hoping they do manage to find a way to track iPhone, because it’ll be missing a lot from my profile, at least!

You can also get a widget to show what you’ve been using:

Although… If you read this today, you’ll only be able to see stuff I’ve been using at work 😀

If anyone else uses this, feel free to drop me a friend invite. My user name on the site is Cyst.

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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.

Daniel Ek talks about Spotify

Just found a great post about Daniel Ek talking about Spotify last night whe I was searching for people talking about mobile broadband and Spotify on Twitter, you can find the post here.

Here’s a couple of extracts from the post by Matt Churchill:

Spotify’s Daniel Ek last night confirmed that Spotify is considering introducing different price points and that the percentage of premium members is not yet in double digits, and that 80% of Spotify users have stopped file sharing.

It’s great to see that Spotify is preventing illegal file sharing.

Daniel confirmed to the enraptured audience that the main limit to growth is the competition, which is piracy, not iTunes, and that the next challenge facing the Swedish start up is to get users to share their music effectively. Saying that music is the most sociable type of culture and that it “transcends cultures, demographic barriers,” Spotify want to “encourage developers to create tools around Spotify to share music” rather than replace them, taking a leaf out of Twitter’s book.

It looks, from what he is talking about, that Spotify is developing really well – I’m looking forward to see what the company has to come.

Spotify Outside of the UK

What do you think?

or:  ‘Another Spotify post?!’

I have recently talked to a few friends who really like the sound of Spotify, as I’ve talked about before.

So, they live outside of the UK, that sucks. There’s no real legal way for them to access the kind of service that Spotify provides. So I went for a look about on Google to see what I could figure out.

First off, the only ways to listen outside of the UK is to either use a proxy (f.e. http://proxy.org) and create an account through that. This is fine, but after a couple of weeks from a non-english IP address you won’t be able to use Spotify anymore.

Or an idea which came to my mind the other day was to just… Get someone from the UK to sign you up and renew it now and then. That way it’s made from a UK IP address and can be easily logged into to reset the ‘you can only use this for 2 weeks if you’re travelling outside of the UK’ message.

I don’t in anyway encourage people to use these methods, by the way. I’m not sure how much it hurts Spotify as a company, but I’d hate to have enough people doing this to damage them.

Another question that came to mind was does the travel access on premium allow you to use your account outside the UK on a permanent basis rather than just the normal 2 weeks?

Also, what about mobiles? How do they figure out where you’re listening from? I assume mobiles have IP addresses tied to the correct country, and not where they were made. That or they figure it out by checking your ISP, since getting coverage on mobile broadband abroad would be hard. I would guess either IP addresses or that you’re using a UK phone provider.

Hopefully with the sudden growth of Spotify, it’ll be hitting other countries soon (maybe there should be an online petition made that nobody would look at?!). However, Spotify still have Apple/iTunes to compete with. I wonder what move Apple will make to make sure it stays on top of Spotify, will we be seeing the same type of service or a paid service with a lot more options? We’ll have to wait and see.

Spotify Goes Mobile

Quicker than I ever thought it would get there, Spotify announced yesterday that they are hitting the Apple and Android market.

As an avid music fan, this is really awesome.

Before now I didn’t bother with the iphone due to it not being able to hold all of my music – however, having spotify on your mobile is literally like having millions of tracks in your pocket.

Even half a year ago in March, Spotify had 2,582,501 tracks available. Doing a search now (this is done by searching for ‘”year:0-9999″ without quotes  (thanks Brett) – If you’re reading this in the year 10k, I don’t know what to tell you) pulls up these results:

Tracks: (4,401,049)
Albums: (396,229)
Artists: (328,578)

One thing that I did have on my mind when reading the announcement was what type of mobile broadband the iPhone has. Is it even called that on the iPhone? Wifi and 3G I suppose. Will streaming use up a lot of bandwidth? Downloading a single file on my current phone is like taking my bank account around the back of the house and putting it out of it’s misery. My guess is that if you plan on using this app, you’ll want a contract that permits a lot of free data browsing or something which has a fixed price. I bold this so no one can complain that they tried it and had to end up selling their house to pay the bill.

Something else to be taken into consideration is Spotify Premium. To use the service on your mobile phone you’re going to have to pay £9.99 a month or £119.88 for a year for premium, this is purely for using it on a mobile – the service is still free on a computer.

For fun I tried to work out the price of a Spotify track if you were to pay the Premium price (thanks to Brett again ’cause I suck at maths); Spotify comes out at 0.000002 pence per month per track vs iTunes at 99 pence for track that you will own (this seems the most common price, I couldn’t find an average). We were going to figure out price per track listened to in an average lifetime… but we’ll leave that for later. It works out that Spotify becomes the cheapest once you listen to about 5000 tracks though (if you like to count payment towards the songs you listen to instead of the millions you might not).

Quality wise, Spotify has the upper hand with 320kbps. Needless to say, if you do buy premium it will also apply when using your account on a computer. Before this app was released, Premium was quite expensive for what you got in return (although what they’re giving away for free is a huge incentive to support them anyway).

However, here are the advantages as they look now:

• Exclusives
  Exclusive access to pre-releases and concert ticket lotteries.
• No ads
• Travel access
  Go anywhere in the world and listen to your favourite music.
• Mobile music
  Use Spotify on your iPhone or Android device.
• Higher sound quality
  Stream music in a higher bitrate, up to 320kbps.

Here’s some of the features you’ll find on Spotify Mobile:

• Stream over WiFi or 3G
• Offline playlists
  Play music even without a connection, for example when riding the underground or on a plane.
• Access your Spotify account
  All your playlists will be made available.
• On-the-fly sync
  Add a track to a playlist and see it appear immediately on your computer and vice versa

A quick look at the app in action:

With all the focus on the iPhone, I actually haven’t mentioned the Android much. I’m pretty ill informed about both of the phones, to be honest. After reading articles about both, I still haven’t haven’t figured out which one would be better for me. With this new app though, I think I might be buying one. The problem is, dear reader, I haven’t a clue which. Input appreciated!

Would you like to know more? (points for knowing reference)

http://www.spotify.com/en/mobile/overview/

Spotify – Outside the UK?

After talking to my friends lately, they’ve recognised my love towards Spotify, which I’ve mentioned in this blog… More than a few times.

As expected, some of them wanted to have a look at the program. However some of them live outside the UK, mostly in places in Europe that are not supported (places like Denmark and Poland) by Spotify, they don’t have access to it. This is when it came to my attention that there are a lot of blog posts about using the program outside of the UK.

Personally I wouldn’t promote it too much, as it is most likely illegal to do so, although I do believe it should be able to be used anywhere (as I’m sure the team at Spotify would agree). The process basically involves using a proxy to trick the site into thinking you’re from the UK, or asking someone from the UK to make an account for you.

Amidst all of the posts about how to do it, I haven’t noticed any talk of this though:

When I try to login it says that my current country does not match my profile?

When you login Spotify checks the Internet protocol (IP) address that you use to connect to the Internet and compares it to the country you set in your profile when you registered. If they do not match and you are away from your home country more than 14 days you will not be able to log in. If you have moved we suggest you change the country in your profile, as long as you have moved to one of our other launch countries. If you travel extensively you can purchase a premium subscription for unlimited travel. In some cases this error can occur by mistake if you use Spotify at work as many companies route their traffic through other countries therefore you appear to be abroad. If you’re at work and have this problem you can solve it by logging in to your Spotify account at home once and awhile.

What that basically means is if you do use the proxy method of tricking the website, the app itself will give you 2 weeks while it figures out that you don’t live in the UK,  or if you’re just on holiday. It then stops you from listening to anymore music. The question begs; is this rule in practice or are people managing to evade it? Getting someone from the UK to log into their account or using a proxy comes to mind again.

I’ll be watching carefully to see if there are any updates, or if anyone else has an opinion or info, feel free to post.

File Sharing and Legal Alternatives

Sometimes I just can't get outraged over copyright law

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening.

Having been away for a while, I haven’t had a chance to update the blog. But now that I’m back I wanted to focus on a subject I’ve been hearing a lot about recently, the the clamp down on people illegally sharing copywrited work on the net, this being the latest one I have read.

As far as I can see, the major debate is if repeat offenders should be punished by being completey cut off from their broadband. This of course means that people would be monitored and their net cut off via IP if they are visiting sites like pirate bay, or using applications like Bit Torrent software.

At first glance you might say ‘Okay, sounds fine – they’re essentially commiting a crime by downloading illegally.’

But a few things picked up in the article:

• Monitoring the sites you visit – invasion of privacy.
• Masking your IP address – makes the ban useless.
• A complete cut of your internet – removing the right of free speech and commincation?

It will be interesting to see what comes of it, a fine to people who download might be a better idea than all out cutting their Internet, but I think in the long run that providing legal alternatives is something to think about (Spotify, BBCi Player and 4oD come to mind, which all seem to be working very well).

Legal alternatives (which have come up before in the news, due to ISPs complaining that it is a cause of a lot of bandwidth usage) provide music, TV or movies for free with the drawback of an ad here and there, and have actually helped me personally in finding music or dvd sets that I later bought. I’ve yet to see anyone legally provide movies (with the exception of 1 movie on BBCiPlayer) on demand however – but maybe we might see this in the future.

Spotify, A World of Music

Spotify. Everyone Loves Music.

Following my post about the iPhone, I suddenly remembered something I had been meaning to talk about here, but forgot for quite a while. Free music!

For a long time, people have been listening to music online. In the early days the only way people could do this was illegally, with clients such a Napster offering free peer-to-peer music, until they were forced to shut down and re-up in a more legal form.

Next came clients such as iTunes, a pay per album/track service with free previews. Very successful, and a blessing to people who wanted to buy their music online – but not illegally.

This leads onto what I want to talk about here, Spotify.

Spotify is a concept which has been seen before, except on a much lesser scale. One example being Pandora; I’ll probably talk about this in a past tense, since it was shut down here in the UK, however I think it’s still running in the US.

Pandora asked you to enter a song you liked, which then created a sort of ‘radio station’ of similar songs which you could vote up or down depending on if you liked the song. This, in turn, helped the application in seeking songs better suited to you. The main flaw of Pandora was that in their contract with the companies which produced the music, they couldn’t let you listen to the song you searched for, only similar songs, or sometimes the song you searched for if it came up on the random results the radio station generated. Point being, they weren’t aloud to show you the song which you searched for on purpose.

Spotify challenges this. If you search for an artist you get an iTunes like list of albums, artists and songs matching your query. Last time I checked they were showing numbers of at least 6 million songs world wide – which you can simply search for and listen to, it’s as easy as that.

“How does Spotify pay for this?”, I hear you scream. A number of ways. First, I’ll cover the part which could possibly annoy people, although it has never annoyed me – advertisements;

From my experience the audio advertisements are sparse – around every 10 songs or so there will be a short message, mostly these messages are an artist advertising their new album, a small price to pay for unlimited free music and also a chance to find new music. Another way they advertise is through the graphical interface – this will be a banner somewhere on the Spotify client, but I haven’t really paid a huge amount attention to these. Again they are not displayed for a long time, and I’m usually looking at something else while listening to music, so I personally don’t see much of them.

The second way in which they pay for this is to offer a premium service, which I’m currently not a part of, but have been considering joining just to keep Spotify going. The premium service costs around £10 a month, and lets you browse music with zero advertisements. You also get to preview albums before they are released to non-premium members.

All in all, this is a great piece of software and if you like music, you’ll learn to love Spotify. I only hope it doesn’t go the way of Pandora – forced to close in the UK.