App Focus: Rdio
This week I’m going to be reviewing one of my favourite and most used apps on my phone, Rdio. Rdio is a music streaming service that can be run on your phone or on your computer via the internet or by a downloadable program. And when it comes to music streaming services in Canada it’s one of the only ones and one of the best ones.
First lets talk about the UI. The UI is clean and very user friendly. Above is a screenshot of the home page of the app. It offers quick access to your collection (music that you’ve starred), playlists, queues, heavy rotation (popular music), activity (what other users are doing), history (what you’ve listened to lately), new releases, top charts, and recommendations (based on your music selection).
When you launch into a song or playlist you are taking to the now playing screen. On this screen you are greeted with a large cover art visual and toggles to play, skip song, go back, repeat, and shuffle. There’s also a slider to skip forward or backward in the song and on the bottom toggles to access the song list (either all the track in the album or all the songs in your playlist) and another toggle to get back to your previous screen.
There’s also quick toggle from the notification bar and the lock screen.
When it comes to music selection, Rdio has a lot to offer. Currently their are over 18 million songs in their database. They’ve got everything in their library: pop, rock, hip-hop, rap, indie, country, soundtracks. There’s lots of disney soundtracks and I even found some renditions of Zelda songs on there. They’re continually adding to their database all the time. The only downside I’ve found with their library is that some albums are region restricted. My hope is that such things will be lifted soon enough.
One of the nice thing about Rdio is that you’re able to sync music to your phone directly. That means that you can pick what songs you want to sync and they’ll be downloaded onto the phone in their own format for offline use. It’s very easy to un-sync and sync songs. So when your phone is running low on space, songs can be easily removed from the device.
Now lets talk about pricing. Rdio is a subscription based music service so it’s not free. There’s a free trial available but after the trial runs out you’ll be looking at $10 a month if you want access on your mobile device. There’s also a family plan available for use. For two users it’s $17.99 a month and $22.99 a month for three users. Now I was a little hesitant at first about joining a subscription service but when I thought about it, I decided it was the best option for me. To buy an album, CD or Digital, will usually run about $10 a month alone. So in essence, if I’m listening to one new album every month, it’s essentially paying for itself. I’m sure others will disagree with me but to me it’s a reasonable choice for music lovers.
If you guys have any questions about the app or the service you can let me know.