Smiley's Life

While looking around for a Last.fm alternative ever since it became a paid service (I only found out a month ago), I came across Grooveshark. Grooveshark lets you listen to any song at any time for free. Except for an ad in the right side of the page (and audio ads between songs, that I’ve yet to encounter), the service is completely free and doesn’t require you to listen to some radio “station” to listen to songs. You can either build your own playlist or choose a radio option that will pick songs based on your previous songs. You can also listen to a “tag radio”, a station that plays songs from a specific genre.

You can even upload songs, and not just ones you own the copyright to! Yes, I’m not bluffing! The whole service is based on sharing, and thus every song you listen to on it was uploaded by another individual. Got a song the website doesn’t have? Upload it so other people can enjoy it too. To test this theory, I looked up the soundtrack from Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s E3 trailer and I found it in seconds, even though it was released less than a week ago. I even tried to look up an Israeli song and found it. You can add songs to your library if you make an account, mark songs as favourites, create playlists, and more.

The best part about it? This is available worldwide. No regional restrictions, no licensing crap, nothing. And if you get a VIP subscription for $3 a month or $30 a year, you get mobile streaming, no ads, a desktop app, Last.fm scrobbling, a bigger library (50,000 songs!) and more space for favourites (5,000!), early access to new features, and a bunch of other stuff. If Grooveshark manage to release their iPhone app on the App Store by the time I get my iPhone, I’ll give VIP a shot. The iPhone plan I’m after has 10GB of bandwidth, more than enough for music streaming. If Grooveshark streams songs at a bit-rate of 160kb/s (wild guess), my calculations say 10GB should be enough for nearly 139 hours of streaming, if I do nothing else. To emphasize, if Grooveshark actually streams at 256kb/s, it would still come to 86.5 hours. Plenty of songs.

And being a sucker for detailed web 2.0 design, this service already won me over.

EA Week has reached Day Five, and with it, three games have been discounted:

• Mirror’s Edge is 75% off, meaning this beautiful game will cost you only 5 measly bucks. I personally recommend this game and consider it to be one of the most fun, beautiful and innovative games EA have to offer.
• Dead Space is 50% off. I’ve heard Dead Space is a great, survival-horror game and for $15 it may just be worth it. I’m considering it myself.
• Spore and all of its expansions (Creepy & Cute Parts Pack and Galactic Adventures) are 33% off. I liked Spore, and I was considering repurchasing it on Steam to have a SecuROM-less copy, but at $26.79 I don’t think it’s worth it. The discount is too low, not to mention the fact Spore’s current (pre-sale) $39.99 price tag is too high considering its reviews and content.

I highly recommend you to pick up Mirror’s Edge. At $5, it’s a steal.

…because so far, I’ve gotten bigger response on Tumblr than I did on WordPress, self-hosted or not! Plus I love having the option to just share videos and links without feeling like I have to write a full-length article on the thing. I don’t have times for full-fledged blog posts anymore. I have so little time for it that three weeks ago, I started writing one about a “[Third-Party Source] Mod of the Week” thing and it’s still in my drafts folder, along with a very old BioShock 2 review from over 2 months ago that I’m thinking of deleting.

Tumblr is so much more about life and so much less about indie journalism.