So, I finally gave in and bought Spotify Premium for a month. I’ve been largely looking at the iPhone version and have a few quick week one observations:
- 3G is not reliable enough for me to do streaming. I’d typically get half-way through an album and hit stuttering.
- Great for sampling new music.
- Offline mode does exactly what you want it to do, but is completely playlist centric. You build a playlist and can either play it in order or in shuffle. If you happened to a number of artist’s tracks into a playlist out of album order, that’s too bad. You can’t sort it.
- It sorely lacks the ability to search amongst your offline tracks to just play individual albums i.e. if you have a playlist full of Green Day albums, you can’t just pick “Dookie” and go. You need to go through the playlist. Some kind of local search would be invaluable. You can kind of do this if you have signal, but that seems like an unnecessary requirement: the tracks are right there, just index them.
- The flick through artwork to get to the next track is nice. Very much in keeping with the rest of the iPhone.
- Had a few crashes, but nothing major.
- It’s not their fault, but not being able to background the application is a nuisance. I frequently write notes for later use and having to stop the music to do that is a pain.
- Having to sync offline mode via wi-fi is equally painful. A thousand tracks takes HOURS. I’m not an expert but I’m sure the USB cable can be used for this via the connector API.
I’m now into week 2 with more carefully crafted playlists and things are better. I might update again next week.