While comparisons with other similar services – such as Last.fm – are inevitable, Spotify has certain characteristics that make it stand out from the rest. You can search the entire Spotify music database in several ways (by artist, album, genre, decade, label brand…), create as many playlists as you want and share them with other users, and learn more about your favorite bands thanks to extensive, highly detailed biographies. Spotify also helps you discover new music through the “Related artists” and Radio service.

There are three types of Spotify accounts: Open, Unlimited and Premium. Free is limited to 10 hours of free ad-supported a month (approximately 200 songs) and lets you play each song up to five times. Unlimited has no ads and no playback restrictions. Finally, Premium includes high-quality MP3 (also with no ads or restrictions) and also includes an offline mode for playlists.

The one big criticism of Spotify was the lack of social features. Luckily the developers took note of this complaint and include a bunch of new social elements in Spotify’s next version – together with the Library, a centralized area from which you can manage your music collection – including Spotify’s lists and your own MP3 files, which you can now import into Spotify from your hard drive, your Windows Media Player Library or your iTunes library.

The brand new features included in the latest version of Spotify now let you manage and sync the music in your iPod, iPhone or Android. Also, the Spotify mobile app has been made available for anyone, and not just Premium users. Last, but not least, Spotify has launched its MP3 download service, thanks to which you can buy and download individual songs and also your custom playlists. The price depends on the number of songs you want to download – the longer the playlist, the less you pay for each track. You can pay with credit card or Paypal, though the latter is not accepted if you only purchase one song.

Just like a good wine, Spotify gets better with age. If you don’t mind the limitations in the Free version (or you’re willing to pay for the Unlimited/Premium one) it’s probably time to ditch your old desktop music player.

Spotify lets you browse, play, share and buy music, including not only your lifelong favorite bands, but also brand new styles and artists.

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All of your purchases are available to stream and you can also download them locally and have the files auto imported into iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Simple streaming and local playback

Since the focus of Amazon Cloud Player for PC is to access your purchases of CDs, vinyl, and mp3s, having an Amazon account is required. Depending on how many albums or singles you've purchased, they will be loaded automatically into the app.

You can also designate a local folder to upload music into the player so your local library of music is accessible from the cloud. Amazon Cloud Player for PC also has the ability to create playlists and download your albums from the cloud to a local folder.

Designed for simplicity, there aren't many options, though you can manually adjust the size of the cache for streaming playback and restore removed music with a click.

It doesn't have access to the Amazon MP3 store directly from the app. Instead, it opens a new tab in a web browser.

Very easy to use

One of the best parts of Amazon Cloud Player for PC is that it's very easy to use. You are given all your albums in an easy-to-see grid layout by default, but you can change it to a list view to see individual songs.

If you start typing anywhere in the Amazon Cloud Player for PC window, it will automatically start searching for relevant songs or artists.

Downloading songs is simple. You drag-and-drop the album or songs into a small window on the right and the app starts downloading the songs.

Overall, Amazon Cloud Player for PC is a streamlined program for listening to music bought through Amazon.

Meant for simple playback

The design of Amazon Cloud Player for PC is meant for simplicity. You can play music, download songs from your Amazon account, and define local folders.

What you can't do it change streaming audio quality or change the theme. The black background highlights the album covers, but if you are missing the album cover from music, then you only have a generic album icon.

There is also no equalizer or presets in Amazon Cloud Player for PC, so you have little control over the sound of your music.

Great for Amazon users

If you buy a lot of music through Amazon, then Amazon Cloud Player for PC is perfect for you. It allows you to easily download all your purchased music and offers simple playback that will satisfy most users.

The lack of advanced options is disappointing, but is great for people who just want to listen to their collection through streaming or local means.

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Nokia Music for Windows 8 is a desktop version of Nokia’s streaming radio service available on Windows Phone 7.5. Similar to Pandora and Spotify, Nokia Music allows unlimited audio streaming of “Mixes” categorized by artist or genres. You can also download Mixes for offline use or use Nokia Music for local music on your computer. While Nokia Music for Windows 8 has a $3.99 monthly subscription, there is a seven day free trial that includes all features.

How it Works

Nokia Music uses streaming Mixes which are similar to Pandora. You cannot select specific tracks for on demand listening. Instead, each Mix is a radio station that focuses on an artist or genre and provides similar sounding tracks. You can browse through Nokia’s premade Mixes or create your own. The default Mixes include various genres, top charting music, recommendations from popular musicians, sponsored music, and more. Nokia’s library is large and includes various genres of music, standup comedy acts, and songs from TV ads. If you are not a subscriber you will be limited to only 30 second previews per track, which is far too short. Subscribers will be able to listen full length tracks.

Creating your own mix is much more limited as you can only search by artists and not other categories such as genre or time period. You can also only add in three artists at most, resulting in a limited selection of music. On the plus side any Mix, premade or your own, can be downloaded for offline listening. Offline tracks are unfortunately disabled for non-subscribers. If you’re not satisfied with Nokia’s selection of music you can also use the app to listen to your own local files.

How it feels

The layout is comprised on large and medium sized tiles grouped into sections. The sections of Nokia Music include the track you are currently listening to, previously Mixes, default Nokia Mixes, your own creations, downloaded music, and local music. On the main track page there are buttons to display a song’s lyrics or open a menu with the band’s information. Depending on the artist, this can include a bio, image gallery, their Twitter feed, upcoming shows, similar artists, and Mixes they appear in. This is a wealth of information that will help you learn more about bands and discover new music.

Right clicking on Mix will provide buttons to download the track, buy it from Nokia’s store, or remove it from the front sections. The options menu includes changing accounts, updating subscriptions, providing feedback to Nokia, troubleshooting, and permissions. Settings allow you to adjust audio quality based on your connection type (Wifi or mobile), permission to send personal data back to Nokia, display wallpapers, and if the app runs is allowed on the Lock screen. Nokia Music subscriptions are relatively new, yet the amount of options is surprisingly plentiful.

Quality

Nokia Music’s wide selection of music and comedy is very impressive. The quality of streaming audio is decent at 192kbps for all tracks. Downloading music is generally fast, although you can suffer delays and pauses in streaming if you download several Mixes at the same time. Music with offensive lyrics are either listed with a clear “Explicit” icon or are completely censored with more broadcast friendly versions. The latter is very surprising for an online streaming service. In most cases all of Nokia’s library is clean and there is no setting to listen to adult versions.

Accessing Nokia’s library requires either a Nokia account or Facebook along with a monthly subscription fee; this is also on top of the normal Microsoft account to run the app. Surprisingly, if you sign up with Facebook Nokia Music will not update your activity or provide any form of social linking. Without a subscription you will be limited to short 30 second clips and cannot download music.

Final word

Even though you need a subscription and cannot access on demand music, the app still provides an amazing selection of music and comedy as well as the ability to download Mixes. The amount of additional data about artists and lyrics helps to connect you to the music. Try out Nokia Music’s free trial to listen to a diverse assortment of music.

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Overview

Pandora is a music streaming website that helps you discover new music and artists. It does this by taking into account music you give either a thumbs up or thumbs down after listening to it. The more songs you rate, the better Pandora gets at personalizing song suggestions for you.

Features

Pandora One Desktop App does the same thing, except straight from your PC's desktop this time around. Using the Music Genome Project, Pandora One Desktop App will analyze the music content of the songs or artists you enjoy and will subsequently play music that shares some of those defining characteristics.

Pandora One Desktop App is also a nice looking app. It's small and has a great, sleek appearance that will fit most peoples' aesthetics.

Pandora One Desktop App is only available to people subscribed to the streaming website's paid service, Pandora One. In order to make use of this app, you'll need to be a paid subscriber as a result.

On top of the same great service the regular Pandora web app offers, Pandora One Desktop App gives you better music quality and, best of all, no annoying commercials or advertisements during your music listening experience. Music aficionados will undoubtedly love the new perks that come with a premium membership.

Installation

To install the Pandora One Desktop App, simply go to Pandora's website, log in with your user name and password and click on your email address at the top right. Then click Settings from the dropdown menu, and choose the Install Desktop App link at left of center. From there, you'll be prompted to join Pandora One if you haven't already or will simply be allowed to download the app if you have.

Pandora One Desktop App offers all the comforts and conveniences of Pandora's music discovery service, straight from your desktop.

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If you love using YouTube to look up music to listen to, you're going to love this music player. Musictube offers a much more elegant solution than searching for different tracks individually on YouTube. Its interface is beautifully designed and will let you quickly search for artists and tracks.

When you play an artist in Musictube, the playlist will be populated with tracks by that artist. One of the best features of Musictube is the ability to switch between the live, studio, or cover of the currently playing song. You can also enable the video of the song to be played in a box on the bottom right. Musictube supports up to 1080p video. There is also a full screen mode that lets you enjoy your music distraction free.

In use, Musictube worked fairly well but initial start up can be a little slow and buggy, sometimes freezing for a minute. While Musictube is beautifully designed and easy to use, it leaves much to be desired in terms of sound quality, which is to be expected. YouTube uploads don't usually have the best sound quality. It'd also be nice if Musictube included some music discovery tools.

This trial version of Musictube limits playlists to 10 tracks and doesn't support video.

OMusictube is a well designed and easy to use YouTube music player although the sound quality and music discovery need improvement.

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After installing the program you’ll see a new button beside the search field, on top of the Spotify interface. From this button you can enable and disable Equalify, configure its 10 bands to achieve perfect sound quality, and save your presets for future use.

Equalify is really simple to use and doesn’t have any special configuration options. The only thing you need to take into account is that Spotify must be closed before installing Equalify and that it may ask you to restart your computer. Also, make sure you install the plug-in in the same folder as Spotify.

The only thing we missed in Equalify was having a few ready-made presets to start with. Other than that, it’s a great complement for an already awesome application.

Equalify adds a fully functional 10-band equalizer to Spotify with which to enhance sound quality.

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Indian Radio is an application that gathers a total of 77 India-oriented radio stations, playing them via a built-in player. The stations are organized by station number, name, genre and language. Since I'm not familiar with Indian radio, it was hard for me to judge just how good the selection was, but it includes stations that seem to be relatively well-known, such as DesiZone Radio, Akash Radio and IBN7. The stations are based in different countries, broadcast in different languages and cover interest areas such as music, news and entertainment, so you are sure to find one to suit.

The main Indian Radio interface is an attractive Word 2007-inspired design, but the program doesn't have many configuration options. You can only chose hotkeys and the interface skins, but you can't add or remove stations. At the time of testing, the radio stations seemed reliable, but the TV options weren't so great. One thing that was missing is the ability to sort stations by the columns, a small feature that would make Indian Radio much easier to use.

Indian Radio provides a great selection of stations, but a lack of configuration options really lets it down.

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There are plenty of music streaming services like Pandora radio and Spotify but those services serve up annoying ads if you do not have a paid subscription. Enter CherryPlayer, an easy to use music streaming app with YouTube integration and no ads!

Music takes the limelight in CherryPlayer with a huge chart of the top and trending songs. If you don't see something you like, you can do a search and add tracks to your playlist. CherryPlayer will even play the tracks you have on your hard drive. Just drag them into the player and they'll be added to your playlist.

Music quality is good but can vary from song to song. CherryPlayer also supports watching and downloading YouTube videos. CherryPlayer gives you quality options when choosing to download a video, which is handy. Unfortunately videos are downloaded as .flvs, which doesn't work with most portable devices. It would have been nice to have some video and audio encoding options in the application.

Overall, CherryPlayer offers a solid music and video streaming experience but its interface is cluttered and there's no audio/video converter.

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RadioSure allows you to browse through a huge variety of stations, sorting by language, country, genre and title. You can also add new stations and toggle a variety of configuration settings that run from enabling hotkeys to recording radio.

There are various ways of listen to RadioSure - via the main interface, minimized to a smaller bar, or minimized completely to the taskbar. The taskbar option will let you carry out the majority of actions you need by right-clicking.

Even though RadioSure has lots to recommend it, the problems Elena mentioned in version 1 still stand. Some radio connections are dropped and some won't connect at all. This is a common problem with streaming music apps, however, and RadioSure has so many stations available that you won't be stuck for music to listen to. There's still no in-built payer to listen to your recordings though, and I felt that the search function wasn't as good as it could be.

Despite a few small problems, RadioSure is still a great option for listening to internet radio.

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The presets in Tapin Radio include stations from all over the world, classified by region, genre and network. They’re all accessible via the Presets menu, which can be a bit annoying sometimes – especially when dealing with lists of hundreds of stations. That’s why it’s probably best to open them from the search tool.

Besides playing streamed music, Tapin Radio also records it to your hard drive in several formats (MP3, OGG, WMA and AAC), by simply pressing the Record button. Other tools included in Tapin Radio are a sleep timer and an auto volume feature.

Both the player and the recorder in Tapin Radio offer very basic functionality, as well as a simple interface design. The program doesn’t include any documentation, but then again, it doesn’t really need it. Some users might consider the app a little too pared down, but others will surely appreciate the simplicity.

Tapin Radio lets you listen to free internet radio stations from all over the world and record them to your hard drive.

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Screamer Radio's not much to look at, but that doesn't matter too much because it means it’s very light on resources. You find your radio stations through the presets, which are divided into Genre, Language, Network and Region. There is also an online web directory and you can add stations to your favorites for quick access later.

When your station is playing, the information available about it and the track are displayed in the Screamer Radio window. You can also record the music that’s playing, although the success of the recording depends on how much information the station provides. There are few basic effects and stereo settings available to play around with, and the more technical among you will be able to manually edit Screamer Radio's more advanced options.

All in all, we were really impressed with Screamer Radio. The interface is clean and informative, there's a good selection of stations and music quality is high. It’s a really streamlined tool - is does what it has to do, excellently, and there are absolutely no unnecessary distractions. Perfect!

Screamer Radio. It's popular for a very good reason - it rocks!

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The beauty of the Last.fm Scrobbler is that it encourages you to find similar artists to the ones you already like and pushes you to interact with users who share the same tastes. Search results appear as a tag cloud, with the biggest elements being the most popular. With thousands of songs available on Last.fm, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll listen to the same thing twice. The Last.fm Scrobbler is streamed and you’ll have to be connected to the internet and have a Last.fm account for it to work.

Although slightly bulky, the Last.fm Scrobbler is sleek and accessible. We like the shiny control icons and the “now playing” window. This is where you’ll find artist information like album cover, a small description of the artist, related tags and artists and top listeners. The Last.fm Scrobbler menu bar on the left includes your recently played tracks, recently loved and recently banned, although to listen to these you’ll need to upgrade your Last.fm account.

With the Last.fm Scrobbler, you can connect to neighbors' stations and listen to their tunes. The lists of the friends you made on Last.fm will also appear on your player. If you have the Audioscrobbler plug-in installed, Last.fm Scrobbler can also track all the songs you play in your favorite desktop music app (like iTunes) and connect you with even more neighbors.

Most of us here at Softonic have Last.fm connected all day, simply because it doesn’t require you to have your own music library, it’s free and provides an endless flow of new tunes. In line with modern evolutions in online music, Last.fm Scrobbler mixes streaming and social tools to give you an exciting music player.

The Last.fm Scrobbler - no music fan should be caught dead without it.

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Antenna lets you browse thousands of online radio stations worldwide. The program combines a huge list of radio stations with a world map, enabling you to use either interface to search for, find, discover and listen to different radio stations every day.

To tune in to any station via Antenna, simply browse the list and double click, or move around the map and double click any dot. The selected radio station will be shown in a separate window over the map, where you'll be able to control volume and rate it.

You can sort the station list in Antenna by country or genre, and also see the most recent entries and top rated. The program also includes a built-in search tool. The only drawback to Antenna, as with any other similar online radio tools, is that you may find the odd broken station.

Antenna is an original online radio tuner that helps you discover thousands of new radio stations from all over the world.

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This means that with Replay Music you can literally save a copy of all your favorite songs on your hard drive, whether you listen to them on Last.fm, Pandora, Spotify or MySpace, to name a few. Besides downloading the songs, Replay Music also includes automated tools to detect silence between songs and identify the track you’re recording.

Replay Music is really simple to use: all you need to do is make sure the program is already active when you start the music source you want to record. Then, press the Start recording button and let Replay Music do the rest: recording the song, converting it to MP3, identifying if possible and adding the corresponding ID3 tags.

You’ll find a few configuration options in Replay Music to tweak the recording quality, select folders to store converted files, change the recording volume or set up the file’s naming template, among other possibilities.

Replay Music is an easy, quick way to save your favorite music from online streaming services as MP3 files on your hard drive.

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Setting up Audiogalaxy is really easy. All you need to do is create a user account on the website and download the Audiogalaxy client to your PC. This client is what makes streaming possible between the computer and your portable device. So far Audiogalaxy works with iOS- and Android-based devices.

The Audiogalaxy web app is clean and intuitive. It automatically imports music from your hard drive – provided you store it in the system’s default music folders – and lets you create custom playlists just by dragging and dropping files.

The mobile apps are Audiogalaxy’s greatest assets. With them you’ll be able to listen to your favorite music anytime, no matter where you are. The only requirement is that your computer must be switched on.

Audiogalaxy offers an interesting way of enjoying your music collection at all times.

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The program includes thousands of stations, all conveniently organized by genre and region or country in a tree-like structure. You can also add your own stations or type the URL of any of them right into RarmaRadio.

Besides listening to radio and watching TV, RarmaRadio also lets you record up to 10 streaming radio stations at the same time. Recordings can be saved on your hard drive in different formats (MP3, WMA, AAC and Ogg), with the possibility to split songs automatically. Recording doesn’t work with TV stations though.

RarmaRadio includes many other extra features, such as integration with Last.fm, support to find lyrics and album cover art, and “wish” and “ignore” lists for certain songs, which turn it into one of the most powerful streaming apps we’ve tested. Sadly, the interface doesn’t keep up with the program’s features, and would benefit a lot from a more stylish design.

With RarmaRadio you can enjoy thousands of free streaming radio and TV stations.

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The slick interface is packed full of features and options, while the stations themselves are easy to negotiate. Nexus Radio's selection of broadcasters is arranged by musical style, station name, bitrate and format. Although we hadn’t heard of lots of the stations on offer, there is a great variety in all genres and you’ll have no problem finding music to listen to.

When you get bored of listening to streamed radio, Nexus Radio also lets you search for artists and songs. You can mark songs and artists as favorites, for easy access later, tag them, and even directly record audio to your computer. If all that that wasn't enough, the program comes with some cool visualizations, as well as Facebook integration.

Despite the great selection of radio stations and extensive options, Nexus Radio has a few issues that make listening slightly less comfortable than it could be. Adding favorites is not very intuitive, something that complicates the playing of results found via the search. In addition to this, many of the additional features must be managed via the Nexus Radio webpage, which doesn't make the experience entirely self-contained.

Nonetheless, Nexus Radio is a great little streaming application, and if a few fiddly problems don't bother you, you're sure to be grooving away as soon as you download.

Nexus Radio's great selection of stations means there's something for everyone.

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