Grooveshark Introduction and Invites

Martin Brinkmann
Jun 10, 2007
Updated • Jul 21, 2013
Music and Video
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18

Grooveshark is a new social music website that is currently in closed alpha stage. I was able to get an invitation to the system and would like to write about it here on Ghacks and also give out some invites to Grooveshark to a handful of lucky readers.

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 so that you can  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.


grooveshark interface

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 hiccup 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 invites  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 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.

Update: Grooveshark is limiting access to users from specific countries. The service is still available for free though if it is still available in your country. It is now no longer necessary to share files to listen to them on the site.

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Comments

  1. Anonymous said on August 1, 2010 at 12:43 pm
    Reply

    Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?

  2. Mike J said on August 1, 2010 at 2:58 pm
    Reply

    Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.

    1. Martin said on August 1, 2010 at 3:39 pm
      Reply

      Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.

      1. Mike J said on August 2, 2010 at 2:30 pm
        Reply

        huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
        Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.

  3. myo said on August 1, 2010 at 5:52 pm
    Reply

    yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.

  4. Kishore said on August 13, 2010 at 2:55 pm
    Reply

    Error:
    Buidling font Cache pop-up

    Solution:

    Open VLC player.

    On Menu Bar:

    Tools
    Preferences

    (at bottom – left side)
    Show settings — ALL

    Open: Video
    Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
    Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”

    Save
    Exit

    Re-open – done.
    Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts

    Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc

    1. Martin said on August 13, 2010 at 3:10 pm
      Reply

      Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.

  5. javier said on August 14, 2010 at 1:50 pm
    Reply

    @Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
    I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.

    Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?

    I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…

    /thanks
    /j

  6. Kishore said on August 15, 2010 at 12:38 pm
    Reply

    @ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,

  7. Kishore said on August 15, 2010 at 12:39 pm
    Reply

    @ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.

    No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure

  8. Ted said on October 22, 2010 at 3:57 am
    Reply

    Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me

  9. Evan said on December 8, 2013 at 1:48 am
    Reply

    I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).

  10. Mike Williams said on September 6, 2023 at 1:26 pm
    Reply

    Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?

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