Spotify’s newest personalized playlist aims to make life more enjoyable for commuters with a healthy helping of inspiration from radio. The new playlist is Your Daily Drive, and it blends tailored music with podcast programming and news. Continue Reading
Spotify is known for its vast stores of metadata, but that information is usually invisible for listeners. Arielle Vaniderstine, a developer advocate engineer at Spotify, has made a new tool available called Nelson that puts the streaming service’s curation controls in your hands. Continue Reading
Today’s Test Drive explores a tech niche that has been getting lots of buzz lately: podcast discovery. With the audio format on the rise in cultural cache and audience numbers, it makes sense that new properties would emerge to offer additional services to listeners. One of these is Podchaser, a podcast discovery tool currently in open beta and has more than 18 million podcast episodes. The theory of a massive podcast database that’s searchable and filterable is an admirable one, but Podchaser still has some big wrinkles to iron out. Continue Reading
Discovery has been a topic of great interest to the podcast creator and producer community, with top minds of the industry looking for better ways to get shows to the ears of excited listeners. Several companies and hosts are working on solutions to the problem, but some of the most promising answers have emerged from totally new startups. One such fresh endeavor is Audiosear.ch. Its discovery tools scale well to accommodate both new and veteran podcast listeners, and the initial trial of using it shows a tool with lots of promise. Continue Reading
Streaming music and playlists have comfortably established themselves as a top choice for access among today’s listeners. But the debate over the best approach for the curation of that digital music rages on. New lean-back streaming contender Conduit has entrenched itself firmly on the human curation side of the music experience. Continue Reading
Podcasting is in a boom, but the audio format still has a long way to go before achieving mainstream familiarity. Tools like RadioPublic seem designed to be an entry point into podcasting by making the discovery process simpler for a newbie listener. The question is whether this app can succeed in reaching them. Continue Reading
Spotify occasionally releases widgets that put data analysis tools into the hands of its users. The latest one is dubbed Organize Your Music. It surveys your saved music collection and proposes reorganization by genre, mood, decade, style, popularity, and other categories. The RAIN editorial office gave it a spin. Continue Reading
Spotify has launched a new personalized playlist feature, Release Radar, which appears in every user’s Browse section. Release Radar is Spotify’s first expansion of the technology which powers Discover Weekly, an unquestionable hit with users and a triumph of algorithmic music curation. RAIN’s Anna Washenko and Brad Hill take Release Radar for a spin, and share their impressions. Continue Reading
Less than a year after unveiling a major iOS redesign, Vevo is sprucing things up again. Whereas the November updates focused on aesthetics, the new changes center on discovery tools. I explored the changes on iOS. Continue Reading
If the adage is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, then a free music service that’s legally on the level is even rarer. That’s the promise of Trebel Music, a mobile download service that’s focused on high schoolers and college students. Will young listeners find a fresh appeal in music downloads? Continue Reading
The trend of platform-agnostic streaming took some hits in recent months. But, at least on the business side, interest in that approach to listening has not disappeared just yet. The new player in that space is called Unision. It’s an app for iOS or Mac that unites a listener’s iTunes library with several streaming platforms. Continue Reading
Last summer, SoundHound shared an early look at its plans for a new personal assistant app. Hound promised to have a fresh take on voice activation and control, offering a step up from the currently available crop of programs. This week, the free app emerged from beta. How does it stack up? Continue Reading