PreCentral forum member jackofspeed submits this review of the Spotify webOS app and service, as he’s from the UK and can use Spotify

Here in Europe (the land from whence this author hails), Spotify is kind of a big deal. When their webOS app became available last week, it was the end of a 12-month wait for those of us lucky enough to be able to get the Spotify service. To most of you though (i.e. the United States) it may be an unknown commodity, and this is as much a review of the service as it is the app.

A quick summary is in order: Spotify is a cloud-based music streaming service, not unlike Pandora, but with one key difference – you can choose exactly the music you want to play. It’s as simple as that; if you want to listen to a specific artist’s new album, you just search for it and play it. What’s more, if you don’t mind a few adverts, it’s free to do so! Alternatively, you can pay £4.99 a month for ad-free streaming to a computer at 160kbps, or £9.99 per month for ad-free streaming at 320kbps to a computer or mobile device.

The more expensive of these services also allows for offline storage of playlists (limited to around 3000 tracks) so playback can continue in the absence of a data connection. The service also supports collaboratively editable playlists, scrobbling, and social links via Facebook or as web links which can be used in any way you wish. Incorporation of local music into playlists is now supported as well, so the Spotify app can really act as a hub for all your music on your Pre or your desktop. Yes, you understood that correctly, Spotify does what iTunes does, but with a subscription service like Zune Pass built right in.

But what about webOS? Well the Spotify app supports all the features described above, provided you have a Premium subscription. You can build playlists on the phone or on the desktop app, and they sync through the cloud between devices in a totally transparent way. Got a good Spotify playlist already? Install the app and it’s there, ready to go. You can hit play straightaway and it’s off, playing your music pretty much instantly. This works flawlessly over Wi-Fi, and pretty much flawlessly over 3G GSM.

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If you’re looking for an alternative to Pandora for your music streaming needs, look no further than Grooveshark. Unlike Pandora, Grooveshark allows you to play the songs you want and combines it with an advanced recommendation engine. Those recommendations are also tied into the playlists of other Grooveshark users you follow (assuming you and your friends have similar musical tastes).

Grooveshark’s webOS app debuted earlier this year and recently received a hefty update. The new Grooveshark 1.2.0 brings a long awaited notification area dashboard player for controlling the streaming music playback from within other apps. There’s also now a shuffle mode option for your playlists and search filters to better narrow your results. And if you happen to be in a poor signal area, Grooveshark can detect that and serve up lower bitrate tunes for continuing (if lesser quality) music.

The app has received a number of other smaller updates, tweaks, and bug fixes to bring it to the big one dot two dot oh. Check it out – Grooveshark is available for free from the Palm App Catalog, with full functionality offered through a $3 monthly subscription, which by the way, allows you to stream copies of your own music. Cool, eh?

Source: Grooveshark Blog

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As we speculated in an earlier post, Spotify is now officially available on webOS. It is a free app but requires a premium subscription.

Spotify is available only in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands. The rest of us will just have to watch in envy for now, as Spotify says on their website, "at this time we don’t know when we may launch in more countries."

If you are not familiar with Spotify, it is a fantastic music streaming service that lets you play any song you can think of over the airwaves, or download it to play offline. You can save those songs in playlists, or share them on Facebook, Twitter, email, or with other Spotify users. You can even use it to sync your music from your computer (Mac or PC) to your phone via wifi, and play it on certain tv’s and audio devices in your home. You can also use it for Last FM scrobbling.        

It is available on a wide array of mobile platforms, including iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, Nokia smart phones, and others. 

WebOS devices are some of the best media devices in the smart phone market, both in terms of hardware and vast selection of audio and video streaming apps. Having one of the crown jewels of music delivery services in its repertoire helps solidify webOS’ place as one of the great families of media devices.

Source: Spotify; via: webosroundup

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HP’s recent acquisition of the Seattle-based company Melodeo should prove to be very interesting to the future of mobile music and how smartphone users access that music. As previously reported, Melodeo is a music streaming company which allows you to sync your iTunes library to cloud based servers then back to your smartphone or PC. It seems only obvious that webOS devices will benefit from this purchase, as HP is now the parent company to both Palm and Melodeo.

What isn’t as obvious, at least not yet, is how brands outside of the HP portfolio are also going to benefit from this service if they aren’t already. Melodeo is currently partnered with all four major US carriers (plus some smaller players) to bring music and media streaming to both smartphones and computers. According to their website, Melodeo services already reach over 50 million wireless customers through these distribution partnerships.

nuTsie is just one of the music streaming services developed by Melodeo and now owned by HP. nuTsie has the potential to be as ubiquitous as iTunes when it comes to mobile music while employing some features that may win over not just webOS, Blackberry and Android users, but oddly enough, iPhone users as well. nuTsie allows users to sync their iTunes library to the cloud, enabling streaming of that music back to their smartphone or PC. What you may not know, however, is that nuTsie does more than just stream your iTunes library to your devices.

First, Melodeo built nuTsie on its own proven high-quality, low-bandwidth mobile streaming technology, eliminating the need for massive amounts of device storage or the hassles associated with side-loading music to your devices. This makes high-quality streaming of your iTunes music library available to you on your smartphone or a PC anywhere you have wireless service.

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We’ve confirmed with Palm that HP now has ’official’ HP apps in the webOS App Catalog, though they come via a different route than you might expect. These weren’t apps from that internal develop-for-webOS contest, but instead apps from Melodeo, a service HP purchased back in June before while they were busy assimilating Palm. 

These apps, five of them at publishing time, are “Top 100” music apps, and as you might expect from Melodeo they’re of the delightfully streaming type.

Each app retails for $1.99, and plays their respective genre/grouping of songs shuffled and commercial-free over Wi-Fi or cellular data. Of course, since this is streaming music you don’t own the tunes, though they will give you the option to purchase each song individually via a purchase button for each entry in the playlists. Currently available “Top 100” apps from Hewlett-Packard/Melodeo include Top 100 Reggae Songs, Top 100 Rock Songs of All Time, Top 100 90s Songs, Top 100 Love Songs, and Top 100 Country Songs of All Time.

Melodeo designed the Top 100 for each genre to change over time based upon a proprietary recommendation engine that looks at other users playlists and what they’re listening to. The service also learns much like Pandora, and introduces you to new music in the genre. Melodeo’s website and service – nuTsie.com (an anagram of iTunes) is very flexible allowing the user to build their own playlist from the music available on the service. It also introduces a bit of social sharing, giving the user the ability to listen to friends’ playlists and add those songs to your own playlists should the fancy strike you. If that doesn’t warm your heart to the apps, well, how about this: nuTsie / Melodeo currently employes Dave Dederer for Business development, a founding member of The Presidents of the United States of America who still manages the band.

Strike up the band HP is brewing up some competition. Imagine the Melodeo nuTsie service being matched with Beats Audio on a webOS superphone. Sounds good right?

via: WebOS World

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One of the biggest complaints about the Palm Pre when it was first announced, was the lack of an SD card slot. Thanks to an interesting device called the AirStash, we may have a solution for the webOS. According the company’s latest tweet, it works fully with the Palm Pre and and Palm Pixi.

If you can make it through the above video’s strong iPhone content, you’ll be able to see how the device works.  Think of it like a wireless thumb drive, using a media server.  Basically, the AirStash creates a wifi access point that you can connect your device to, and stream files from it. And rather than having a predefined flash memory size, it has an SD/SDHC slot supporting up to 32GB.

The beauty of the AirStash is that once you’re connected to it from your device, all you need to do is go to a particular URL in the web browser and you’ll be able to use an HTML5-enchanced web file viewer interface. In it, you can stream and download any files from the SD/SDHC card.

The AirStash is still quite a new product and as such, is only currently available in Canada and the USA. According to the company’s FAQs page, the battery life can last up to 5 hours of video streaming, which isn’t too bad.

There a few catches though. For one, file uploads must be done via the usb adapter (or via a SD/SDHC card reader), though a future firmware is planned to allow file uploading via wifi. In addition, it doesn’t seem as though the wifi access point offers any sort of security, so other people could possibly connect to to access point and view your files.

If that doesn’t bother you, the AirStash is available on their website for $99 USD.

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While there are all sorts of streaming music apps available for the Palm Pre (Pandora and Slacker, to name two), there’s one more service has made its presence known on webOS: Grooveshark. Their app, as demoed above, leverages Grooveshark’s popular and powerful recommendation engine to find other music you might like. Like Pandora you can rate a song up or down (smile or frown, in Grooveshark lingo), but you can also save playlists and songs for later repeat listening and sharing with other users.

What makes Grooveshark truly unique, however, is that users can upload their own content to the service. Like YouTube, you can upload whatever music or other audio you want (from your desktop, of course – that’d be too much for webOS) to Grooveshark. What makes this cool is that you can upload your own music collection to Grooveshark and listen to it from wherever you have an internet connection, be it on a friend’s computer or on your webOS phone using the Grooveshark app. Cool, eh?

Grooveshark is available now, for free, in the App Catalog.

[via: MobileCrunch]

Thanks to everybody that sent this in!

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I heard word from Kevin C Tofel of jkOnTheRun that Slacker Radio was coming to webOS, so I hustled on over there and got a demo. Good news: it’s almost completely baked and should be available within a month or so. Bad news: Slacker announced that they’d be offering offline access to music for a variety of platforms, but webOS isn’t going to be one of them at launch.

Still and all – it looks like a solid music stream app to me,

Confused? Here’s the score: Slacker is a music streaming service much like Pandora. However, Slacker offers a few benefits like curated genres, a much larger music library (nearly four times the size of the ‘leading competitor,’ they say), and a pro account you can pay for that will let give you even greater control over your music. I don’t want to say that Pandora has been getting a little stale in the music that it has been offering me lately ….but I just said it.

Those BlackBerry kids have been loving Slacker for some time now — soon webOS users will be able to join in the fun.

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