Rdio and more!

So this week I teamed up with Jeff to try out Rdio, one of the many awesome music streaming services out there. I made the switch from Spotify for a few reasons, the first being that Rdio has a far superior UI as well as social media capabilities. Spotify has piggy-backed off of Facebook’s network quite well, but outside of posting to the Open Graph, Spotify lacks a lot.

Rdio is also free without ads, which is a plus. They’ll cap you after a month if you use their service too much — they use some fancy algorithm to determine that, haha — but I think that’s much better than what Spotify offers. And if you want unlimited, uninterrupted service, you can just use Grooveshark! All three scrobble to Last.fm too, for those of you who care about monitoring your listening habits. :)

Rdio also has cleaner music tags than Grooveshark or Spotify, and it can be played inside a browser or on the desktop, much like Pandora One users (which I also use). And since Jeff and I are paying for a family subscription, we get to pay less than with Spotify for the top features.

At work I’ve run into some minor interface bugs but nothing that I couldn’t figure out how to fix. The biggest problem is probably skipping, which occurs over slow Internet connections such as large work networks or at home when I’m also uploading a YouTube video. Spotify lets you get around this by setting songs for offline use, and even without that feature Spotify seems to stream better for me. Pandora will sometimes stop, while Rdio seems to have the worse frequency. However, Rdio lets you sync tracks with your phone so this is only really a desktop issue.

Above I embedded a playlist featuring Hey Monday and Paramore, two female singer-lead pop punk bands that I’m really jonesing right now. It’s also a great showcase of the social power of Rdio; you can use it without signing up or leaving my blog! Pandora and Spotify all require you to open in their apps. >_< Isn't Rdio grand?

And no, I'm not just a huge fan of Rdio because one of my co-workers left to go work for them. :) But dammit, he was a good developer and that definitely speaks volumes about a company that wants to hire him!

Edit: Turns out Grooveshark does let you embed playlists! It wasn’t as UI obvious as Rdio but still something I could’ve easily seen if I looked more carefully. :P