SoundTracking Adds Full-Length Tracks From Rdio, Spotify And YouTube
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
SoundTracking, Apple’s favorite music app of 2011, celebrates the moments of your life with music on iOS, and last fall, became a Spotify app.
Its vision expands again with Tuesday’s integration of full-length tracks that play within the app, from Rdio, Spotify, or YouTube. You can add these features in the latest update.
The company calls this Smart Play. What does it mean?
If you subscribe to Rdio or Spotify, you’ll be able to use SoundTracking as a way to listen to music within those services, in addition to listening to the video on YouTube, or buying the track from iTunes as you have long been able to do. To bring up any of these four options, you simply tap a little symbol at the upper right of any song in any of your friends’ feeds. (SoundTracking integrates with Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and Instagram.)
“This was an important effort for us, since we wanted to complete the discovery-playback loop and let our community enjoy the rich, colorful music videos and entire full-length audio for songs they discover as a part of sharing music moments with each other,” emailed Soundtracking co-founder and CEO Steve Jang. “We worked closely with the APIs of YouTube, Spotify and Rdio (which were the most [i]n-demand music services outside of iTunes) for our users, to enable a one-tap fluid experience which found the best match within that service, and then immediately launched and played that specific song for an immediate playback user experience.”
As always, SoundTracking lets you follow friends to see the music they’ve tagged, as well as sharing songs yourself, which you can do by search or acoustic identification. If you choose the YouTube option, the song starts playing with a single tap, although you might end up with a live version, the way we did If you subscribe to Rdio or Spotify, we recommend those options instead, for a better full-track experience. However, if you’re not already signed into that service on your phone, you’ll have to log in before the music plays.
Overall, the ability to play full songs does change the utility of SoundTracking, so if you already use it, you should definitely grab the new version. And if you have yet to give it a try, why not? It’s free, and as with This Is My Jam (which also works on iOS and Android), it might work for you, as a way to keep tabs on what some of your friends want to share, music-wise, as opposed to merely a feed of what they are listening to.
The full announcement:
We’re excited to announce today a big change to how you enjoy music using SoundTracking! Many of you have told us that you love being able to share and learn about new music in SoundTracking, but you wished there were more ways to listen to the entire song beyond the music moment. As a result, we’ve been working on a simple and fluid way to let you enjoy the best-matching music videos and full-length versions of the songs you discover on SoundTracking. Today, we’re happy to share with you our new Smart Play feature which is available now in the latest version of SoundTracking:
- A new Smart Play button on the top right corner of every music moment which instantly matches you to the best music video and full-song audio track available
- Watch music videos and play full-length tracks using one of your favorite music services such as YouTube, Spotify, and Rdio*, in addition to iTunes.
- Browse and share directly from your music library when creating a music moment
*All SoundTracking app users will be able to view YouTube music videos inside their app, but to use the Spotify and Rdio options you’ll have to install that music service’s iOS or Android app on to your mobile device.
