Grooveshark is an online music service I discovered recently and have been trying out on and off on my desktop.
Although I have been a long time fan of Pandora and probably will be for a very long time, I have found a new love for Grooveshark.
You are probably familiar with how Pandora works. They do all the work for you in discovering music based on your likes and dislikes.
What if you wanted to manage your own playlists, songs, albums, songs, etc. From millions of songs out there in the world without having to buy them or download them from questionable sources. Basically what if you could carry all the music you want in your pocket without worrying about storage space?
Grooveshark is a music service that does just that. You can search for songs, album, artist or just browse genre and create your own playlists. You can also select songs and it to your play queue and you can save that current list as a playlist too.
If you wanted Grooveshark to play in Pandora-like Radio mode, you could do that too. They will find songs based on the current songs you just played. You can view the next song that is to be played in Radio mode and choose to play or delete it from the queue.
You can click on smiley face or frowny face or mark a song as favorite.
Grooveshark was so far only available on the jailbreak App store Cydia. Apple has approved the Grooveshark iPhone app and it is now available in the App Store.
You can sign up for a free 30-day trial VIP account right from the app. Once signed in, you can search for songs, favorite them, add to queue, add to playlists etc.
You can access all your playlists, search for songs from the iPhone app. You can even edit your queue and create a custom playing order. The reason I love this service is because it has a good dose of some Indian language albums (Hindi & Tamil) as well.
The VIP accounts cost $3/month or $30/year as an introductory offer.
Now the things the free Grooveshark iPhone doesn’t do well. First glaring mistake by the service, no iOS 4 multitasking support!! How can a music streaming app be actually useful without being able to be run in the background.
Another thing is that the app doesn’t seem to support playing an entire album on the iPhone like the website.
I am going to give it a 3.5 rating just for the iOS 4 support or lack of. If you have been waiting for Spotify to hit the US (which costs $9.99/month), Grooveshark is here today and they are doing a kickass job!
Screenshots (click to view full images)
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Availability: App Store
Price: FREE
Reviewed at version: 0.8
