Finetune - needs refining/tuning Wednesday, February 14, 2007
In the week since I started listening to music via finetune I've been generally very impressed and have recommended it to lots of people.
However, I've found myself repeatedly comparing it to the pandora service that I've regularly used.
Two things stood out for me in comparison - how easy Pandora makes it to give a track a thumbs up/down, and to skip past tracks you don't like.Adding tracks that you hear on the finetune player to your own playlist is a multi-stage process, rather than a simple "one-click" affair. Whilst Pandora doesn't have the concept of builfing playlists because it builds randomised station, it is easy to say you like/dislike things.
With regard to skipping tracks, it was only today whilst searching for the feature that I found it by chance by hovering over the music player in the top left corner. When your cursor is within the music player to the right of the album cover image a "next track" arrow appears, whilst a "previous track" arrow appear when you hover on the left side. Ok, perhaps I should have found it sooner, but guess what - I've been "conditioned" to think that the controls would be along the bottom of the player and oddly the arrows don't appear when you hover below the album image.
I appreciate that there are other control located there, but it did throw me. Duh. Hence this timely Kathy Sierra article resonated with me.
If only last.fm would bring out a means of me importing the tracks I'd listened to on finetune.
Labels: finetune, last.fm, music, pandora
posted by John Wilson @ 11:55 AM Permanent Link
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2 Comments:
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At 9:28 AM,
said...
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A problem I have with finetune is that whenever I try to advance to the next track it won't let me (at all, ever). It says something like you need to listen to some of these or something like that. And has an annoying button you click off of that says "Whatever". Very Very Annoying!! I like finetune but that needs to be fixed.
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At 9:35 AM,
John Wilson said...
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Jacqui, I seem to recall in the T&Cs or perhaps from their blog that you can only skip past so many tracks per hour. I believe this has something to do with their online "radio" licence which only allows the user marginal control but which keeps it free to the user. However, I believe you can switch artist "radio station" any number of times. Acknowledge that it's probably more fiddly than you want though.
