[Version 1.0]
I’ve had a few days to play with the VIP (read: $3/month subscriber) Grooveshark app for iPhone and am quite happy with it so far. They’re calling it a sneak peek version, but it’s already quite polished, and quite a pleasure to use. The app can stream and cache tunes over most any connection, although I’ve stuck to wi-fi and 3G for the highest possible sound quality. The dealbreaker here is still the ability to listen to full versions of any song that Grooveshark has in its database: no songs that sound like what I want to hear — just exactly what I want to hear, when I want to hear it.
[From left to right: search tab, now playing, favorites tab]
Search and queue
The main tab of Grooveshark is the Search bar, and it lets you search by song title, artist, or album. There aren’t any sorting or filtering features yet, though, so this tab works best if you already have an inkling of what you’d like to hear.
Once you tap on a song you’ll bring up a song menu that with playback controls, an option to favourite or cache the song, throw it into a playlist, or buy it on iTunes.
Now Playing
Once you’ve picked a song to play, this is the screen you’ll be taken to. Now Playing displays album art (when available), playback controls, and you can tap on the screen at any time to reveal the track timer.
You can pick and choose every single song that Grooveshark plays or you can toggle Radio mode on and let the service pick similar songs that you’re probably going to like. Happy and sad emoticons on either side of the Now Playing screen help you tailor the radio picks to your taste, and a Favorite button will mark a song to show up in the app’s Favorites tab.
Offline mode
It’s a little unclear how much time is needed to cache a song for offline play, but I recommend letting the Now Playing buffer fill up before you specify a song for Offline play.
Entering Offline mode is toggled by a switch in the app settings, and it turns the Search tab into Offline songs. The songs aren’t organized in any significant manner, but they are searchable, and the playback quality was excellent for songs that I had streamed over wi-fi and 3G. You can specify a maximium storage capacity for all of your offline songs so that Grooveshark doesn’t take over your iPhone storage.
Conclusion
There are still a few crashes here and there, but this sneak peek at the Grooveshark app is quite solid overall. I would definitely appreciate some more sorting and filtering features in the Search bar and I also think the offline mode needs to be clarified, but most everything else about the interface is fun to use. Grooveshark is an excellent companion to the iPod app, since it can instantly fill the gap in your music library by quickly looking up a song in the service’s massive music database. It’s also an ideal candidate for backgrounding 😉
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The Grooveshark app is currently available for free on Cydia, but it’s only usable by paid Grooveshark subscribers.
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TAGS: grooveshark, music streaming
