Ey Up,
I was going to join spotify premier for £9.99 per month then noticed that you need to download an app.
Does that mean that you need a smart phone to listen to the music offline on your phone?
My daughter has a basic blackberry and my missus and I have aging Sony Ericsson's. They have mp3 players in them but I don't know if they will work with spotify.
I don't particularly want a smart phone so spotify may have to get the heave ho if one is needed.
Thanks for any help with this.

You need a smartphone yes.

-Eban

Can I also state that you can only listen to so many tracks off-line with Spotify.

I am a premium member and the audio quality isn't much better than non-member quality...another thing I should point out is that for mobile phones, it helps if you have unlimited download access.

Spotify is good...but there are better out there with decent audio quality.

Personally I've subscribed to rdio, I'm very happy with it and at least I have access to their US catalogue. Spotify is a good service, but songs choice is too limited depending on where u live.
Rdio works really well and they offer a family plan with 10% off on the second subscription, which is pretty good.

-Eban

Hmmm... 7 days free trial..thats all.... we7 is completely free and so is spotify (with ads) and so is Last FM.... I will give it a try...

Just tried Rdio on two random tracks:

1: New Musik - Living by Numbers

2: Walking On The Chinese Wall - Philip Bailey

Both have different volume levels and there is no compression or limiter on their output which is a must have because there is nothing worse than making a playlist where you have to constantly adjust the volume.

Spotify may be free, but you need a premium subscription to listen to your music offline. Their catalog is also too limited for me.

There is no sound processing on services like Rdio, Spotify etc... The only thing you may have is a volume adjustment (not a real sound processing) if you use Spotify's software for example. Maybe there is something on Rdio to automatically adjust the volume, I will check it out

I've been using Spotify for years (when it was in beta), but their lack of content is too annoying to me.

-Eban

EDIT: haven't found setting for the volume :/ I didn't notice any volume issue so far, but most of the time I listen to albums that's probably why.

Spotify claim that their audio quality is better once you have subscribed...but it is no different.

Some albums sound better than others and some sound as bad as tape...

Personally I'm really please by Rdio, I subscribed a month ago, the app is good, the selection is great, and I haven't found any volume issue yet.

So far so good haha

-Eban

Well the free audio is a 128k encoded stream and the premium is 320k encoded stream. It will depend on how good your equipment is and the quality of the original track if you can hear a difference or not.

Check if you have 320k enabled.

128k usually sounds fine to me. Some tracks sound awful, but I doubt it's the final 128k vorbis encoding that causes the problem in these cases.

Cheers,
David.