Review: Musicality gets Pandora out of your browser
The most annoying thing about Pandora (and Last.fm) is that it only runs in a browser window. Here’s an app that’s just barely an app, but it overcomes this deficiency while adding keyboard shortcuts and Growl notifications, which would make it a must-have purchase for Pandora junkies (if only the price were right).
Musicality (1.4MB) is a Pandora + Last.fm client that gets these two popular online music services out of your browser. Actually, that’s only kind of correct.
What Musicality appears to be is a (sandboxed) standalone browser that only displays the Pandora (and Last.fm) player window. In fact, when you start up Musicality, if you’re running a Flash blocker, such as Click to Flash (awesome), you will be presented with a window that’s blank — click and Flash will load.
That’s pretty cheesy except for the fact that Musicality is a standalone browser that also comes with a few nice additional features. Specifically, you get configurable keyboard shortcuts, which are super easy to setup in Musicality’s preferences.
For example, if you like a song and want to give it a thumbs up, putting it in your station’s queue, you can now do that without digging around to find the Pandora window in Safari. Likewise, you can start or stop Pandora, as well as skip ahead, without switching to the app.
Lastly, Musicality also offers Growl notifications (see above screencap). This allows the app to display track information in one of those nifty translucent info windows that fade in and out — you get the info and then it gets out of your way.
Say that again…
Musicality is offered with a 21-day free, fully functional (such as it is) trial. Thereafter, you’ll be expected to $9.95, which they say is 33 percent off the SRP, and that’s just not right.
Ten bucks for a finished, fully functional app is one thing and quite another for a sandboxed browser window that doesn’t even load if you’ve installed Click to Flash.
Yes, creating a stand-alone Pandora (and Last.fm) app is a cool thing and, on behalf of Pandora fans everywhere, I’d like to say thanks for that. However, charging $10 for this app “as is” is rather less than fair.
Still, having Musicality around for 21 days is going to be nice…
What’s your take?
Thanks for the review, and the well-reasoned criticism. The Click to Flash issue was a real “d’oh!” moment, especially since I run it here myself. There will be a fix for that in the next version; until then the workaround (click on it) will be included in our list of known issues.
As for the price? well, of course I don’t entirely agree. You seem to be judging it based on how much work you think went into it, rather than on the benefit it provides. This is a 1.0 release after all, and there are new features on the way including support for more services and Last.fm scrobbling. And updates, as would be expected, are free.
I’m glad you like it though. And if after three weeks you still think the price is high, I do hope you’ll check back to see what we’ve got in store.
I’ll take that as a dare — awesome, looking forward to it!
My two cents here:
While Musicality may be useful for Last.fm fans, it’s not as ideal for Pandora users, especially since Musicality doesn’t seem quite ready for prime-time.
Instead of Pandora users paying $10, they may want to simply download the free Pandora standalone application for Windows, Mac and Linux from the official Pandora.com website. This app uses the Adobe Air technology elegantly to let the browser sit apart while allowing basic functions of Pandora.
To get rid of the ads seen in this application (which looks almost identical to the Pandora app for iPhone/iPod touch), a Pandora user can subscribe to Pandora One for $39 a year, which removes what few limits there are to enjoying this internet streaming radio.
The Pandora One player is a nice little app, but it doesn’t have keyboard shortcuts, doesn’t support the media keys, doesn’t support the the remote. To train a new station you must constantly flip back to the player in order to rate songs, instead of just tapping a key. It does provide Growl-style notifications but they aren’t actually using Growl, so it has a different visual style and the two will sometimes fight (display over the top of each other). If you close the Pandora window the music stops. And it only plays Pandora.
Last.fm has a nice standalone player as well, but it too suffers from the same limitations.
[...] Musicality review generated an interesting back-and-forth on the merits of that app, as well as Pandora Air, an [...]
Just a quick followup: version 1.1 is out now and fixes the ClickToFlash issue (and again, thanks for the head smack on that one). It also adds support for Last.fm scrobbling, so the music you listen to on Pandora will show up on your Last.fm profile, where you can get new music recommendations, and chart it a bunch of different ways (pretty cool). I’ll be working on adding Grooveshark and Slacker Radio next.
[...] my earlier review of Musicality, I came across a bug whereby ClickToFlash would temporarily block the app until the user clicked [...]
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