Here’s a round-up and mini-review of the most recent Spotify-related sites:
- areyouspotified – Music finder site that specializes in club and house music. areyouspotified has a unique look and style all of its own with a team of contributors who are obviously both passionate and extremely well-informed about dance music. The site is updated most days with a dance album recommendation, with a short review and indication of the sub-genre. It’s easy to add comments (no login required) and you can subscribe to updates via RSS. Definitely recommended if you like dance or electronic music.
- toastify – This is an app that displays a toast-style pop-up whenever the track changes in Spotify. I tried to run this on my Vista box, but unfortunatley I couldn’t get it working: it sits in my task bar OK, but doesn’t seem to do anything when the track changes. It’s had several thousand downloads already though, and developer zowat seems to update it frequently, so I obviously messed up somewhere. Note toastify requires Microsoft .NE
T to work.
- List DJ – List DJ is an app that gives you the lyrics of the current playing track on Spotify. This works really well: after install, it adds a Spotify-style window to your desktop to displays the lyrics, with a slider to resize the text. It updates almost instantaneously and found the lyrics to just about every song I tested it with. You can’t resize the List DJ window (but try reSizer), and there’s no desktop icon (making it a little tricky to find again), but these are just a minor quibbles. Recommended.
- BeSpotify – BeSpotify is a Ning-based community site which proclaims itself the “Number One Spotify Community.” It has a news sidebar, lists recent activity, and a Spotify-related forum section. There seems to be a growing number of users signing up, so if you use Spotify and are already on Ning, you should definitely check it out.
- Widgify – Startup site that promises Spotify widgets soon. There’s some tantalising screenshots and proof-of-concept videos showing a mini-Spotify widget with play and next/previous track buttons, so here’s hoping they can deliver something soon.
- spotify-forum.com – A phpBB-driven forum for Spotify discussions. You don’t need to be a member to read the posts and although its unofficial, you may see the odd post from a Spotify staffmember. This forum is new and doesn’t have many members yet, but it could well become one of the top Spotify community sites.