Social music site Finetune (profiled here along with competitors) launched their Apollo-based desktop music player this evening. To use it you must download and install the Apollo runtime on your Mac or PC, and then install FineTune. Links to both are here. After installation, you can run the Finetune web service on your desktop, outside of the browser.
The player has been around in beta for a couple of months now (see Ryan Stewart’s review here). It has a number of advantages over Pandora, including playlists with songs on demand (the playlist must have a minimum of 45 songs), and the desktop client is a great addition as well. In my opinion Pandora is still superior to Finetune when it comes to finding related music that you might like. But Finetune wins flat out on design and user experience.
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Sweet. I’ve used Pandora a lot but found I liked the experience at finetune a bit more, the only real issue I had with either is having to play through a browser.
Thanks for the link.
datter
I liked the interface, but I found the quality of the music to be seriously lacking in comparison to Pandora or last.fm. I was able to listen to the songs that I liked, but they were always poorly-produced versions of them…
I recently attended the WebDU Conference in Sydney, Australia. Mike Chambers (Snr Product Mgr for Apollo was giving the key note on Apollo and Flex).
Finetune was demoed as a sample application that could use both flex for the web- based version and Apollo, and it seemed quite neat.
It appears that Adobe is really pushing Adobe Apollo and Flex. And I was thinking about it - it makes sence, this is the next big thing for Adobe. Flash has been (and continues to be a sucess for Adobe) - and this is the next step for that platform.
Read more about what I heard Mike Chambers say at the WebDU conference in Sydney last month about Adobe Flex and Apollo:
http://blog.sherifmansour.com/?p=58
My thoughts - give Adobe another 12 months and Flex and Apollo will be in everyone’s ‘want to learn’ list.
Mike was mentioning that Flex developer salaries have gone up by over 50%.. and I can see why!
Sherif
My interest died as soon as I read these words: “To use it you must download and install the Apollo runtime on your Mac or PC, and then install FineTune.”
The design of this is excellent, no question. There are also lots of nice touches, like default playlists and the ability to create a playlist from any artist in your collection.
What I didn’t like about the software is the very low quality of the audio. Also, I don’t know whether it is just my computer (or the alpha version of apollo) but I didn’t know how to find the app once I had covered it in lots of documents. You couldn’t hot switch to it and it wasn’t in the taskbar. In the end I had to close it in the task manager!
Audio quality is very important to me, so I think I am going to keep using The Filter with my own high quality collection.
Yeah I would like to see -
- A player that is browser based; but uniquely shaped IE ( a simple resized java player)
- Must not require - Active X download - and should be light on bandwidth
- RB
Wow Michael, soon we are going to be reporting on Web 2.0 toilet brushes. Someone please release something that is worthy!
I’ve been using it for weeks now, and I love it. Sure, the audio isn’t the best, but I don’t think it’s horrible. Finetune as a whole is a great service, and this seals the deal. Now, let’s see if we can some other apollo desktop applications —-maybe Pandora, Meebo, Gmail…..
Apollo is neat, and I can’t wait to see other things built on it.
@ #4….
And? VB runtime files, .net framework, JRE… the list goes on and on. Nothing new here.
I have FineTune on my Blog + Love it - very c0ol tunez*
Glad to see the ShoutOut with Silversun Pickups mentioned too - i saw them on one the Latenight talk shows & was blown away by their Energy + rockin’ sound*
I’m interested in taking a further look at this whole Apollo biz - & since i’m familiar with FineTune & certainly like it’s look i’ll give it a whirl*
;))
Finetune is a killer service, and the desktop player is awesome. For those of you who don’t want to install the Apollo runtime (it’s still Alpha, which is scary), finetune also has a desktop widget on SpringWidgets.com that is excellent.
I find the song matching equivalent to Pandora, and far superior to Last.fm. However, the best (little-known) finetune feature is Tag Radio.
You create a tag that is specific to yourself. It can be anything — mine is “all my favorite songs are oldies.” Then you browse to various artists, albums, and songs, click “add tag”, then add your custom tag to the list. Finally, go into the player and select Tag Radio, then your tag.
The result is a playlist that only plays the exact artists, albums, and songs you tag. There are admittedly a lot of live albums on finetune, which I don’t love. However, using the Tag Radio feature, you can just tag the studio albums and leave the live albums out. Or if you’re not picky, just tag the artist, and finetune will randomly pick songs from any of their albums.
My only complaint is that sometimes the selections aren’t as random as they seem like they could be. Some songs are played several times a day, and others I haven’t heard in weeks. Still, all-in-all, the best Web 2.0 music service I’ve seen so far.