Wednesday, July 1, 2009

For Your Enjoyment - Grooveshark

Well, several days ago I discovered Grooveshark, and boy have I been won over.

Not only can you stream any full song from the massive lists there (and believe me, there's a lot), you can build little widgets to post to your blog, website, whatever, with any playlist you can put together. No limit on what kind of songs you can throw in there, as long as it's on Grooveshark, it's available.

Now the "bonus" part. If you have a song (mp3, etc.) that you want to be on that widget, or your personal playlist (for things like... streaming at work?), but what if it's not on the site? Don't fret! You can upload any number of songs from your computer, and in about 24 hours it will be on Grooveshark. However, I did notice some latency between that song's availablility for listening, and its availability to be tossed into playlists and/or put on a widget. This could have just been me, but I also don't know how long that latency was - I tried to get it to work before work and it wouldn't; I tried after work and it went right away. I guess you can chalk this up to demand on the website.

If I was rating Grooveshark, I would still give it 4 stars (out of 5) based on the size of the library, time to upload (24 hours isn't that bad, really, not on a huge site), and "relative ease" in making widgets and getting song information. It was a little "clunky" at first, because I was not used to the layout, but all the little icons give pop-up names telling you what they are, so I may have just been impatient at the time.

Please, enjoy the widget I've plugged into the right side of this blog, and if you don't like the music, go make your own playlist! You don't have to have a user name there to use it, you can make a widget for individual songs (I will be using this part very much), and if you want to save playlists for easy recalling, signing up is free and easy.