Spotify is a service which allows users to stream many songs online free and legally. The service is ad-supported and currently available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. The adverts are only a minor annoyance; I find there is about 2 minutes of them per hour of music. A premium service is also available, where adverts can be removed for a cost.

The service requires a desktop client to play the music. Their client is currently only available on OS X and Windows. Using this software, users can search for music, compile playlists and listen to online radio. The music is streamed as an Ogg Vorbis at 160kbps, so it is very high quality! It also scrobbles the music to last.fm.

The advertising is tolerable. Generally, they last about 30-45 seconds and either advertise Spotify Premium or, currently, the Disasters Emergency Committee in the UK. Premium (ad-free) Spotify costs either 99p a day or £10 a month.

I am beginning to reconsider if I still have the need to download music. Most songs are available free on Spotify, with the exception of some of the newest releases on certain labels. My only problem with Spotify is that it isn’t portable, so I can’t use it on my iPod etc.

Spotify has a bigger collection of music than the ‘full tracks’ available on last.fm.

It is currently only invitation only, but I will give the first 4 people to ask an invite each. Just leave a comment asking for one.

The most obvious difference is that everyone has access to the service called Deezer which does not only provide custom radio stations with music that you (could) like but also ways to search for bands or songs and play them right in the browser. All of that is possible without creating an account at Deezer.

You will need an account however if you want to create playlists, upload an unlimited amount of mp3 that you can listen to online or participate in community matters.

Information are easily accessible. While listening to the Smart Radio feature you can open a band’s discography page which does not interrupt the music. There you have access to information about albums, related artists and community members who share your taste. Only albums with tracks available will be shown.

I had troubles creating a playlist though. The system accepted my input but did not add the playlist to the menu. Deezer is nevertheless a brilliant better Pandora.

You need to do the following to obtain the stream information: The first step would be to compute the MD5 sum of your password. You can do that at rednoize for example. Once you got that information you copy and paste the following url into your browser, edit the two variables username and password and hit enter. (one line of course)

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/radio/handshake.php?version=1.1.1&
platform=linux&username=
&passwordmd5=&debug=0&partner=

Replace with the username and with the md5 sum of your password that you got from rednoize.

The important part of the few lines of text that appear is the one beginning with session=

Remember that part and go to the last.fm homepage. What you need to do know is to seek for something that you want to listen to. We need to create a last.fm:// url that we need later to tune in. Some examples:

lastfm://artist/
lastfm://artist//similarartists
lastfm://globaltags/
lastfm://user/username

You can basically just add an artistname, tag or username to that url. To tune in we need to open another url that looks like this:

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/radio/adjust.php?session=&
url=&debug=0″

The SessionID is the one that you got from the first url while the last.fm URL is the one that you got from the above examples. A valid one would look like this:

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/radio/adjust.php?session=&
url=lastfm://artist/Bridge+to+Solace&debug=0

If the response is ok the text in the browser will say so otherwise it will say failed.

Open your favorite music player and open the url http://87.117.229.85:80/last.mp3?Session= to tune in. It should load and play fine if the response from the browser was ok.

To sum it up again:

1. Go to Rednoize and look up your mp5 sum of your password
2. Open http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/radio/handshake.php?version=1.1.1&
platform=linux&username=&
passwordmd5=&debug=0&partner= and replace the username and md5sum with the correct values
3. Create a last.fm:// url
4. Open http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/radio/adjust.php?session=&
url=&debug=0
5. If the response is ok load the stream url from the first browser response in your music player.

Read More:

Rednoize
via Gabistapler.de

It supports scheduled recordings which is great if you listen regularly to stations that offer music that you would always like to record even if you are not at home. This alone is a feature that I have not seen in another software that is able to record Internet radio.

Another unique feature that is worth to mention is the support for Winamp audio plugins and a cover album downloader that tries to download the correct cover for the song that is currently playing.

Several other feature set it apart as well from other online music recorders. Those are station favorites, the ability to browse the shoutcast directory, selecting random stations, recording size limitations and hundreds of preselected radio stations that can be sorted by country, genre and network.

Probably the best online radio recorder in existence.