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.

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*

;))

And? VB runtime files, .net framework, JRE… the list goes on and on. Nothing new here.

Apollo is neat, and I can’t wait to see other things built on it.

- 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

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.

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

Thanks for the link.
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