I've been using the free version of the Spotify music service for a week now. It took me a little while to warm up to it, but by now I am sufficiently impressed. If you don't know what Spotify is and you like listening to music, then it is worth checking out. I've been listening to tons of music that I've really wanted to hear, but didn't want to buy. I had no good way of listening to those albums since Apple shut lala down. So far Spotify has given that power back to me, and I'm happy. With the free version you are pretty much restricted to listening to the music at your computer. It is great for when I am working. I can put on my studio monitors and Spotify sounds great. I don't always want to listen at the computer though. I wanted a way to stream from my computer to my home theater system. There are several different options, but most were expensive and offered way more that what I really needed. I found a nice application called Airfoil that quickly and conveniently did exactly what I wanted. It is a program you load on your desktop that will stream pretty much any audio from your computer to any iOS device. I put my iPod in my home theater dock, turn on the app, and fire up my Spotify playlists on the computer. It is a pretty sweet setup for very little cost, considering I can listen to almost any song in the universe via Spotify. (They don't have The Beatles)
Another really cool feature of the Airfoil program is that it can stream to multiple iOS devices simultaneously. It is not a feature that I will utilize all that much, but I wish I could. It would be nice if you had a big house... you could stream the same music to multiple rooms. I don't have have a big house though. It could also be neat if you were having a party... the tunes could be played all through the house and you could use a Spotify playlist like a jukebox for your guests to select the songs they want.... but I don't have parties. I did test it out with my wife's iPhone in my alarm clock dock and my ipod in the home theater. It felt fancy to be listening to something in the bedroom and then walk out into the living room and have it playing over the big stereo. Anyway, I digress.
Spotify is cool. Check it out. It is free and seems to be completely unlimited, though you do have to listen to 30 second ads from time to time. In Europe this was the case at first too, but they ended up putting caps on the amount of time per month you could listen on a free account. I think it is 10 hours. That is somewhat lame, but for free it is still worth the money.
