There may be other countries or networks where Grooveshark is not accessible anymore. It feels only natural that some users try to access the site even though it is blocked in their country or organization. Some may even have paid for a premium account and do not want to be left standing in the rain now.

Grooveshark Unlocker is a Firefox add-on that uses an ingenious method of bypassing access restrictions. Grooveshark checks the user’s IP address during the initial connection and either displays the blocked service announcement page or the normal Grooveshark website. The add-on enables a web proxy for that time, and disables the proxy again after the connection has been established and the restrictions have been bypassed.

The developer notes that users of the add-on may need to refresh the page several times before the protection is bypassed. This was not necessary during tests, each connection attempt worked right of the bat.

This method ensures that users get the maximum out of their connection, as the proxy is disabled after the connection has been established. So no slow proxy that is not fast enough to buffer the music stream.

Grooveshark Unlocker ships with a single proxy that may be banned by Grooveshark or discontinued. You can open the extension’s settings to change the web proxy to another one. A click on Find a proxy in the settings opens a new page that allows you to display a list of working proxy servers.

Grooveshark users who are blocked from accessing the service directly may want to try out the Firefox add-on so that they can access the service again. Interested users can download Grooveshark Unlocker from the official Mozilla Add-ons repository.

You probably think that bandwidth and storage costs have fueled that decision, but that’s far away from the truth. It seems that the German performance rights organization GEMA, the bane of all music on the Internet, has once again had its hand in play. The organization is for instance the reason that German users are not able to watch many music videos that are posted on YouTube.

GEMA in 2009 asked Google to pay $0,013 per song played on YouTube. Google declined back then and as a result, German users cannot watch the majority of music videos on YouTube.

Grooveshark likely faced a similar decision, and like Google, Grooveshark decided to pull out of the country instead.

A GEMA mail address is listed on the page for users to direct their complaints to. It may be more fruitful on the other hand to direct complaints directly to politicans and not the GEMA.

Grooveshark recommends the German Simfy service as an alternative. And while that service looks like a great alternative on first glance, it needs to be noted that free users (with an account) only get five hours of free music per month. Users who would like to listen to more music need to switch to the Premium account which sets them back €4.99 each month.

Existing Grooveshark users can export their music from the service. A link is provided in the announcement.

The mobile clients are currently still working. It will however only be a matter of time until they will be shut down as well. (via Caschy)

One thing that you cannot do with Grooveshark is to control the music player with your keyboard’s media keys. If you want to skip a song you need to go to the web page and do that.

That’s where the Windows desktop player WinGrooves comes into play. It basically is a 1:1 copy of Grooveshark in your web browser, with the benefit that it fully supports keyboard media keys and customizable hot keys that work everywhere.

The program seems to be using the Internet Explorer rendering engine (correct me if I’m wrong). Adobe Flash needs to be installed on the system as well.

Wingrooves displays the standard Grooveshark layout after it has been started. Users can use the search to find a song, tune into one of the stations or log into their Grooveshark account to access their personal music collection or playlists. Groveshark ads are displayed in the application which is remarkable, considering that this is the main source of revenue of the service. Members who pay a small fee can remove the advertisements to support the service further.

You can then minimize the application and music will continue playing in the background. A click on the options button in the main interface displays all hotkeys that are configured. They all make use of Ctrl-Alt and another key and can be changed in the menu in case you like to use different keys.

Users with media keys can ignore those keys outright and use the media keys on their keyboard instead.

WinGrooves is only available for the Microsoft Windows operating system. No additional compatibility information are provided. It looks as if the program requires the Microsoft .NET Framework to be installed, but it is not clear which version it requires.

SharkZapper for Google Chrome changes as it provides remote control functionality for the music streaming service. While it does not change the fact that Grooveshark needs to be open in a tab in the background, it offers direct access to much needed controls.

The extension places an icon in the Chrome address bar that expands on a click. The interface displays the song that is currently playing along with cover art if available.

Controls allow to mute the song, change the volume, pause it or load the previous or next song. Users who are logged in can furthermore rate the song (smile or frown) and add it to their music or favorites.

A search is available as well to quickly search for songs on Grooveshark. The search activates the Grooveshark window that displays the search results from where the songs can be played or added to playlists.

A mouse over on the extension icon displays the artist and song that are currently playing on Grooveshark.

Options are available to change the behavior of the extension slightly. It is for instance possible to activate notifications on song change, or to remove the album art from the remote control window.

SharkZapper is available for direct installation at the Chrome extension gallery. The remote has been designed for Grooveshark’s HTML-based interface.

The interface is divided into a header area with playback controls, search options and information about the current song, and a main area that is divided further into tabs.

All that is needed to find songs is to enter the name of a song or artist into the search form. The program displays a list of hits in an extra search window. A double-click on a listed song adds it to the current playlist.

Playlists can be saved and loaded at anytime, with an additional option to import GrooveShark playlists (under Tools).

The Last.fm tab can be used to find similar songs or artists, display the top songs, albums or artists or top songs by geographic location, tag or genre.

There are additional options available, like linking to the user’s Last.fm account to display songs related to that account. Users who want to do that need to supply their last.fm username and password in the Options.

Local songs and folders can be added and included in the search which means it is possible to use the music player even without Internet connection.

Several plugins are already available to search for and display lyrics of the current song, sync the playlist with other devices enable or disable the web remote server.

The player displays biographic information about the current artists as well as album art and related information directly in its interface.

GrooveWalrus is an interesting music player for users who like to tap into two of the largest music databases and local files at once. The player is available for download at the official project website. The Python source code is provided there as well. The player supposedly runs under Wine for Linux or by running it from the source directly. (via)

Better Grooveshark is a userscript that adds several features to Grooveshark. Users who open the Grooveshark website after installation will notice the lyrics sidebar that’s been placed by the script on the right side of the screen.

Artist name and song title are automatically filled out for every song that is playing in the Grooveshark player. The script checks for matching lyrics on sites when the search button is clicked and it is up to the user to select one of the lyrics repositories to display the lyrics in the interface.

Ads are removed from the Groveshark website by emulating a premium mode. Grooveshark premium users and those running ad-blockers or comparable applications do not need this, everyone else will see no ads on Grooveshark.

The userscript manipulates the page title to display the artist and song title in it. It can also emulate some vip features like Last.fm scrobbling and the crossfader.

The Better Grooveshark Userscript is available from the official Userscripts website. I have only tested it in Firefox, it may work partially or fully in other browsers as well.

Grooveshark accounts are available that offer advanced features including favorites and custom playlists. Still, the most important features are available without registration. On top of the ability to play single songs or playlists, there is also the option to tune into a radio station on Grooveshark.

A Grooveshark login is again not required for that functionality.

SciLor’s grooveshark.com Downloader is a free party program that acts as a Grooveshark music downloader. The program is dead simple to use, and requires no account or any other registration.

Here is how the downloader works. Enter a band name, artist, song or album into the search form on top and click on the search button. A maximum of 200 songs will be retrieved from Grooveshark. All results are listed in the format artist – song name, and have checkboxes for selection. Songs can be selected in the listing and added to the download list.

A click on Download there downloads the songs to the local computer system. The speed of the download depends on the user’s Internet connection, and the Grooveshark server. It took a few seconds to download most songs from Grooveshark.

The Grooveshark downloader offers another option besides searching for songs. A click on popular songs displays 500 popular songs from Grooveshark.

The download directory for the music and the song naming pattern can be changed in the downloader’s options.

The biggest strenght of the Grooveshark music downloader is its simplicity. Downloading music from Grooveshark cannot get much easier than that. SciLor’s grooveshark.com Downloader is available for download at the developer’s website. The portable program is compatible with most 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. It was tested on a 64-bit Windows 7 Professional system. (via Webtrickz)

The categories are Songs, Artists, Albums, Playlista and Genres. If you enter an artist for instance you will find songs of that artist in the songs category and the albums in albums obviously. If you pick the albums category you can play all songs of a album which is a nice feature.

The music plays perfectly even if you switch tabs or minimize the browser. Registered users can create playlists of their favorite songs and Grooveshark Lite is recommending similar songs if any have been found.

Grooveshark Lite offers a great design and usability with a huge music database that does find many artists and songs. Naturally not all artists and songs can be found but if you are looking for popular artists, charts stuff and even popular artists in a certain genre you will find them at Grooveshark Lite.

The website is connected to Grooveshark, could be some kind of teaser website to make Grooveshark more popular. If that is the case they will definitely succeed.

Grooveshark works basically the following way. You start an application on your computer and decide which music folders you want to share with the community. This application has to be running in the background to be able to share and listen to the music on the Grooveshark website.

The website is where all the action takes place. You are free to search for songs and albums, add users to your friend list, rate songs, play songs from users that are currently online, create playlists and also download songs from other users. Since Grooveshark is currently in alpha stage not all features have been implemented.

Features like editing song tags and the complete system that will reward users with credits (commissions) for uploading songs to other users have not been fully implemented yet. Contributions such as song identification, verifying ID3 tags, moderating, reviewing and recommending music will be rewarded with higher ranks that result in more exposure to the community and thus receive more download requests.

I can’t really say that much about the downloading system because I have no credits at this time. Song playback is working fine though although there is the occasional hiccough during page loading time. (the developers are working on this at the moment)

About the invites. I was able to get ten additional invites for Grooveshark. Six of the are reserved for the Chinese, Spanish and German sites at Ghacks while four will be given out here. Just reply with a comment and I will randomly select the four lucky ones. Regular readers will be given a higher chance of winning the invites.

I would also like to point out that it would be nice if the users who won the invites will invite more users that have commented in this thread. Please add this in the comments if you intent to do that.