One of the most frustrating things about online music services like Last.fm and Pandora is that they don’t allow users to play back songs in their entirety on demand. The sites have made some progress in the last few months (Last.fm introduced full-song playback for some labels in January and iLike implemented it this morning), but for the most part these features are still limited by the agreements each site has forged with record labels.
Today sees the launch of Favtape, a new mashup that mixes Pandora, Last.fm, Seeqpod, and Slinkset to offer full playback of your favorite songs on demand, without any limitations. The site was created by Ryan Sit, one of the developers behind blog/lifecasting service Swurl.
Favtape pulls your Favorites (or “Loved”) list from Pandora and Last.fm and generates a playlist that contains full versions of each song. The interface is overly basic at this point - you can start and stop the song by clicking on its title, but there’s no way to rearrange them to create a new playlist. Below each song is a list of related links that allow users to purchase the song, view lyrics, and see a list of similar artists. Favtape will initially generate revenue through the links to iTunes, Amazon, and Ringtones displayed under each song.
The site also features a Digg-like “Discovery” option that allows users to vote on the best playlists. Unfortunately, there’s no way to actually tweak your playlists to make them more appealing without modifying your “Favorites” from Last.fm or Pandora. This lack of playlist customization is frustrating, but will likely be added soon.
Favtape makes heavy use of the Seeqpod API, which it uses for song playback and recommendations. While this presumably will help Favtape avoid any legal trouble (it isn’t actually hosting any music), it is also making it totally reliant on a service that is on shaky ground. Seeqpod isn’t hosting any music either (it crawls the internet searching for files hosted on other servers), but that hasn’t stopped the lawsuits from coming. For the time being, though, Favtape offers a great way to listen to your favorite songs without paying a cent. A similar site that relies on Seeqpod (but doesn’t auto-generate playlists) is Streamzy, which we covered earlier this month.
old news. snuzu.com has been using seeqpod for months to let people stream any song on demand.
That’s true. There is another place also. I cann’t remember the name though.
That UI is pretty much a straight up rip from Muxtape. Shameful.
Worth the post just to see that David Hasselhoff’s “Jump in My Car” is actually on someone’s play list!
Jason,
Good looks on the Streamzy shout - new features coming shortly…
-Jesse
I really liked the concept of pandora when it first launched online!
Yes, it is like Muxtape. I’ve credited them on my main website linked on the bottom: http://www.freestylelabs.com/
Also I’m just using Soundmanger2 http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/ who originally made the Muxtape-style layout which I used.
Anyways I give total props and credit to Muxtape for the layout. It’s a great design.
This didn’t work at all for me. Clicked on the titles and it played completely different songs.
Oh well.
Same here. Nice try guys.
The SeeqPod API is a fantastic way to make a quick and popular site. A few months back, I coded http://songerize.com/ in a matter of hours off of their API, and within a few weeks it had been covered on Mashable, Lifehacker, CNET, Wired.com, etc. Plus, I recently sold it for a not-to-shabby sum of money. It has since been redesigned in a way that I don’t completely like, but hey, the ROI was good
Try some more songs. It should work pretty good. Let me know your accounts and I’ll work on fixing the problem.
Interesting that there’s no mention of tinysong.com which let’s you share a song with a friend with a Twitter-style short link. This interfaces into the Grooveshark service. I don’t know too much about either of them, but it would be cool if Techcrunch could interview.
Check out songza.com. It’s a similar service, but much more developed. They save playlists, have a simple UI, can shuffle songs, rearrange them. It’s pretty nifty. All these services test the legal water a LOT though. There’s a lawsuit looming out there for sure, just waiting for one of these sites to get big enough to be worth suing.
This service is great! It found the majority of tracks I’d faved on pandora and last.fm.
Though i’m normally on the side of ‘ho-hum’ do we really need ANOTHER music search - there are tons of them.
But pulling from your last.fm & pandora favs is a nice differentiator.
This thing rocks..it pulled all my favs from pandora
This is clearly one of the coolest things since bread came back unsliced and the way music is going to be accessed in the near future.
Now all we need is Pandora back on track here in Europe as well! When Europeans go to the Pandora site, we get a restriction message like this:
“We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S.”
For the record industry’s sake, I wish they come to admit the facts as soon as possible and start making money again, this time through SERVICES, not products.
And they’re using UserVoice! http://favtape.uservoice.com/
You folks have written about Songbird before.
It’s got great History recollection; I’ve not used it with Pandora or Mashable - but I do all the time with The Hype Machine to hear a variety of new music every day.
When recalling something that grabbed me from a few days ago, Songbird’s Web Media History works quite well.
Coupled with any web-based streaming service, it’s a strong contender.
Hmm, combine this with FreeMusicZilla, and it’s see you later iTunes.
Shout out to Scott Schiller whose user interface was pretty much ripped to use with his Sound Manager - http://www.schillmania.com/pro.....ge-player/
The demos provided with SoundManager 2 are provided with the intent of re-use and re-mixing, if you will.
Very cool idea. E
ven more so, considering you can download all the music on a list with StationRipper - http://www.stationripper.com/stationsniffer.htm
Downloading is so 2007. Who wants to go through the trouble of “owning” 200 000 songs and storing them - even digitally?
Pretty soon you can access all the music ever created, whenver you want, wherever you want, with whatever equipment you want.
It’s the content of a playlist itself that becomes the most interesting thing in the future. Which seems to be taking place right about now.
This is SWEET! While there are a lot of mixtape options out there, this one is great because it lets you aggregate music from various sites. The ability to hear songs from Pandora in my mixtape is great!
I love tinymixtapes.com and I think I partnership between these two companies would be smart.
Tulenheimp - still need to D/L for iPod. And when Phone doesn’t have a good connection.
garbage!
So, how does the artist get compensated for the illegal stream of their art? It’s a disgrace that TC continues to cover sites and technology that erode the fabric of the music industry. How about covering sites that put the control and $$ back where it belongs - with the artist!
http://www.yooglimusic.com
um… imeem.com for full track streaming anyone? seriously. this problem has been solved.