This series is designed as a way to call attention to things, practices, places, activities, or anything else you might not be aware of that I think are worth checking out. I try to cover as wide a variety of topics as I can.
This week is all about streaming music. Thanks to near ubiquitous WiFi and hefty cell phone data plans, gone are the days of being limited to the music you can fit on your mp3 player or phone. If you’re not streaming music yet, and even if you are, here are three extremely useful apps to check out.
Google Music
This is my favourite of the streaming apps. Using your Google account, you simply activate the Music service by visiting their site and your entire music collection will be uploaded to their servers. After that, you can listen to any of your songs, any time, without having to use up valuable storage space on your device. There is a slight catch if you live outside the US, UK, France, or Germany, though. The service isn’t officially offered their, so the first time you travel to the site, it will tell you you’re not allowed. The work around is simple, though. Google only checks your location when you first active the service. Simply use an IP blocker (Tunnel Bear worked for me) to go to the site and log in and accept the terms of service. After that you can visit normally and it will work without problems for you. You can now listen to your music through any computer or android device. Available for Android, PC, and Mac.
(iOS users, Apple offers a similar service, iTunes Match, but with a couple caveats. First, it costs $24.99 per year to access it and second, rather than uploading your actual library it will simply copy the database and give you streaming access to the same songs from iTunes. Initially this lead to many reports of being matched to the wrong version of a song. Hopefully that has been worked out by now, but it’s something to be aware of.)
Songza
This service offers human curated playlists which you can choose from either by searching the entire list or, more interestingly, based on the time of day and the activity you are performing. For example, checking it at 5 PM on a Friday offers playlist suggestions for Working, A Weekday Dance Party, Brand New Music, Office Crowd Pleasers, Doing Housework, and Getting Ready For The Weekend. I’ve found these playlists for be a great way to discover new music and set a soundtrack that is perfect for my mood. Available for Android and iOS.
Slacker
The final service I’ll recommend is Slacker. Like Songza, it offers some curated playlists, but its main draw is its ability to generate playlists on the fly from a seed song, similar to Apple’s Genius Mix or Google’s Instant Mix. It’s an easy way to hear songs similar to a style you like without being limited only to songs you know and have in your library.
Honourable mention goes to Pandora. I love using the service when I’m in the US, but it is unfortunately unavailable in other countries and I don’t know of a simple, reliable workaround for mobile devices.
Know of any other streaming apps I should be trying? If you’re not streaming already, you really should be.
Sleep well,
DTE
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