Deezer music streaming service: how is it?

Some time ago I've realised, that my dataplan and costs for a music streaming service started to be reasonable. So why not try it out. Instead of searching "alternative ways"...

So I've started to search what is available here around (Slovakia). Deezer was first here. Spotify with it's demo app p***ed me completely off. Google Music wasn't here. Grooveshark had troubles. Rdio doesn't work here still.

So there wasn't too much to speculate, I've chosen Deezer. How is it?

What does Deezer provide? 

For 6 Euro a month I have unlimited access to their music database. Including mobile app for music while driving, walking or whatever. There is a possibility to create playlists and sync them to your phone or computer.

Then the social stuff, you can make friends, look what they listen to etc.

For me an important thing is curated content - the system learns my taste and recommends music. I've already discovered some new interesting bands and artists. Not too much, but it's a promising start. There are also editors, living persons, sharing albums and playlists in a kind of feed. And the "Similar artist" feature is great. All three recommendation types are added value for me.

There are a couple of other functions, "charts" and "explore" which are too commercial for me. The "radio stations" are imho useless, there are tons of online radio systems, which are much better.

The music database, what to expect: 

The database is huge, they claim about 30 million tracks, not only pop, but also classic music.

However, this is a commercial services, oriented on sales, so there is a tendence not to care about minority music. So if you search for deep underground or experimental things, or very recent smaller releases, this is hard to find here. I was a bit sad not to find a couple of my crucial albums as well.

But in general, there is a lot of music to discover. Much more positives than negatives.

The mobile app for driving (Android): 

It's pretty basic, nothing special, but it does what it should. For driving it might be safer not to use the rather smaller buttons which you can see on my screenshots and jump a one step deeper. A small UX fix would do this. But otherwise it does smoothly what is expected.

If I would be Deezer, I would immediately license or acquire PowerAmp, which is by far the best Android based mobile mp3 player and use some of it's features. Also I would expect release years at album lists. There is space for that.

It works fine with my in-car Bluetooth streaming feature. It streams tags (artist, album, track) to the cars display and it is possible to jump with steering wheel controls between the tracks. Unfortunately not with my Saab (2007), which does not support this (it plays via AUX), but every modern bluetooth stream system should work fine.

I use Android, the latest version on HTC One. There are versions for iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch), Windows Phone 8 as well as Blackberry.

Conclusion: 

One and half year ago, to have this in my car was a wet dream. Now it's here and it works fine. Despite a small "things" here and there, I love it. It's definitely a try worth.

When things have no reason ...

This is an hour old Waze screenshot from my home city Bratislava. Everywhere traffic jam. It is not usual and there seems to be no reason for that : no rush hour, no snow/rain/ice, no friday, no car accident on some important spot, no sports match or anything similar in the TV, no large police control, nothing ....

It's just there ... strange

Your Saab data in real time

This video is an impressive example of gathering data from your Saab while driving with relatively simple tools. It's a user walkthrough, saying what you need to get the data in real time and much more.

It's an OBDLink MX device reading the data from the ECU and sending them via Bluetooth to an Android smartphone, which runs an application called Torque. The reader is utilising OBD-II standard and this video example is made on a MY2007 Saab 9-3 with B284L engine (stock).

The reactions on the few forums are claiming, that the reader device is extremely well built and fast, much better than the usual chinese production. However there are tests online with cheaper devices which are claimed to work.



According to the description the Torque app besides reading from the ECU has many other features. It can record a mobile video with selected data (throttle, torque, fuel consumption etc) or you can combine them with the video from another camera such as this Saab in the Nordschleife. For this you might need a free Track Recorder plugin.

While reading around the combinations, there are three important things coming out : 1) the amount of informations from the ECU varies by car type, 2) the device takes energy from the battery also with engine switched off, so one has to be careful not to flatten the battery and 3) it needs a quite powerful smartphone.

This device doesn't support iOS based devices, but the manufacturer has wifi based devices, which can be used with Apple mobile toys.

I think my Saab will get a new toy. When the new smartphone will arrive ...

src : youtube

Car apps : internet radio players for Android

For many music fans the streaming radios are one of the important sources for new music hints. I am not an exception and use to listen to them often on the desktop. But this section of the Internet in my Saab was completely closed due to expensive mobile data. This has now changed, I finally could get a mobile phone plan with the data unlimited.

However to find a good free player in my older Android based phone is a different story. I've tried a couple of them and got very different results. Partially because of philosophy of the players but also because of the quality of the code.

So what do I expect from such a player ?

Required features : 1) search function (full text as well as genres), 2) stability of the music play + reliable reconnect if the connection drops, 3) lightweight and simple, 4) support of Shoutcast and 5) to see the track's metadata - artist, track etc.

Nice to have : to send the selected artist and track via e-mail as a reminder to my home e-mail. On one click. Remembering the last listened station or bookmarks.

How I tested : Very simple. Install and drive a couple of hours inside as well as outside of the city, on country roads between towns and villages, where the GSM signal is weaker. Stop somewhere outside, change the station and continue. Hardware : an older HTC Desire with Android 2.2.


Applications :

XiiaLive™ Lite - Online Radio
Pros : Easy to use, can search in genres and text, has history, support tags, writes artist/tracks. The size of 3.6MB is acceptable, a bit at the edge. It's user friendly.
Cons : Unstable, it loose the signal too often. Maybe a larger buffer would help. Battery consumption, but the car charger solves this.

Fusion Radio
The Fusion set of apps seems to be a separate application for each genre or topic. I would buy that concept for music with added value, f.e. when an experienced dubstep DJ selects the best dubstep stations offered in the app. It's nothing like this there. So search button is expected, but missing. Therefore uninstall.

A Online Radio
Pros : much more stable than XiiaLive. Favorites/bookmarks button is great. Very effective text search, however it doesn't search in genres without typing a keyword into the textbox. Hm. Smart app name - it appears at the top of the app list in the phone.
Cons : most of the time it fails to reconnect when the signal drops, which is annoying. Also it doesn't write the radio station correctly. 

Winamp
Pros : Simple UI, music flows on 3-4 clicks. Very very stable. Cca 8s buffer. Search is intuitive and fast.
Cons : 12 MB is a lot. But it allows to install it on SD card. Cca 50% success on reconnect. It doesn't write metadata (artist/track), you have to click for it and it's small. Not very safe for a car.



To be honest I am not very happy with the results. Not one of the app was stable enough in terms of not loosing the signal. I was driving the same roads and the drops were not at the same places, so it has nothing to do with the GSM network itself. Also not one of them could really reliable reconnect.

Winamp provided the most stable music stream and has a great user interface at the start. However the most reliable reconnect came from XiiaLive as well as it shows the most visible useful informations plus a big star/stop button. So these are the two favorites, but not one of them is 100% what I've expected.

I will stick with Winamp for a while, but after dropping it from my Windows desktop (in favor of the great foobar) I have a strange feeling because it's so big and packed with stuff without use for me.

There are more players on the Android Market (whatta stupid name Google Play Market now), so there will come a next round of players in the future. Also I've tried just for fun to use my iPad hooked to the wifi hotspot from the phone. It appeared stable, so let's see.

iPad music transfer and play without iTunes

There are people who don't want to let iTunes scan the computer and synch the mp3 collection with the iPad. For various reasons, which go beyond "the obvious one". I'm one of them. The consequence is to search an alternative solution. I've found one, which seems to work perfectly. It is the Donut Player.

It can connect to your PC (W7 in my case), download files from a directory in a similar manner like ftp, make a local copy on the iPad (iPhone), create a playlist and play it offline. It can do it also the other way around, connect from the PC to the iPad. It is for free and can be found in the Appstore.

It requires more steps than simply to sync iTunes, but it works, you have the freedom of choice and prevents you from downloading too much unlistened music to your device "just because you have plenty of space and maybe you will listen to it". It knows copy/cut and paste.

You have to have both, the iPad and the PC on the same wifi network. First you have to connect and login to your PC. The app sees some directories, where you copy the desired music, download it to the iPad, organise and play. Watchout, untagged music doesn't work. It took me some time to set-up. If you stuck somewhere, a restart through the red cross in the Settings section helps.

I've tested it on the new iPad (iPad 3) with iOS 5.1.

I didn't used Dropbox in this case, because 1) I would need to use internet connectivity and upload music to my Dropbox folder in the cloud which is much slower than local wifi and 2) Dropbox somehow works worse with larger files.

However I use it in other case : local copies of pdf files, both books as well as whitepapers for the work. For this I use pdf-notes which can import from Dropbox all the files, which are marked with the star as important. It's again free, but with ads, maybe I will buy a full version.

All this, because a long flight awaits me tomorrow and every tool against boredom is good. And it can be used for playing music in the car through AUX input as well. Therefore the car apps tag.

Car apps : Sygic GPS Navigation (Aura)

Recently several times Sygic GPS Navigation was recommended as the best existing on Android.  Although I have a GPS built-in and an older TomTom Go 930, so I don't need a mobile GPS, due to curiosity I've tested 7 days the demo version on my HTC Desire (Android 2.2),  so here is the result.

Download & Installation :
Download through the home Wi-fi is question of minutes. Installation as well. The possibility to run the whole thing on the SD card is a must and Sygic allows it. The installed application itself has 12.7MB and slovak maps have ~280MB. After successful installation I've got 2 icons - one for the app itself and one for downloading maps. Clean and intuitive.

User interface, adress input and graphics :
Sygic requires you to register from the phone, otherwise "sorry". The GPS module and application see the satellites but doesn't work. Bug or feature ? I suppose a feature, because Sygic offers you community based services simmilar to Waze where without a connectivity it doesn't make sense. On the other hand this should by an offline navigation, so a correct solution would be to run offline with a message saying something like "if you would like to see events on the road (radars, traffic jams ...) please connect to the network". But these days everybody collects data.

After registration everything worked perfect. Inside are many setting possibilities, for a regular users there is a very good default mode preconfigured. Adress or POI input is easy and intuitive. Multitouch zooming works fine.

Graphics is modern and well-arranged , the 3D mode is very nice. No problems with switching between landscape and portrait modes. For getting where you want, the app offers driving, walking and travel via options, which is great.

Driving :
I've tested it in my home city Bratislava, where I know exactly all the alternative ways how to drive from A to B. In some cases it didn't leaded me the shortest way at all although there were no obstacles on the road or any settings causes. That was a surprise, but this is not the first navigation doing that. It is acceptable for a normal user especially by driving in a foreign city where 3-4km more driving does not matter. But for example for a taxi driver which must drive a shortest way this would be an issue.

Otherwise it leaded me very clean through the city and surroundings. For a convertible driver with the roof down a quick and crisp voice navigation is important, because you dont see anything on the phone in the direct sunshine anyway. Sygic provides that, it works perfect even with a feature to run on background only. I've used this often and as a foreground was an mp3 player.

Other functionalities :
Sygic offers much more than a GPS navigation itself. It includes data from different sources  and it is configurable to show them on the map. Typical examples are weather conditions, speed limits, police traps (community based), navigating to contacts in your phone, integration with facebook and twitter etc. Worth trying.

Buy / not buy ?
If I wouldn't have a GPS navigation already, I would seriously consider to buy. Living in Europe I would go for the Europe package which costs 50€. It's not cheap bud still a fair price for a pretty complex software in comparison to dedicated GPS devices with prices around 250€+. It's at least 3 generations ahead of my built-in navigation, but also 4 years younger and provides broader functionality than my 2 years old TomTom.

I would fight with the small smartphone display therefore consider a tablet which is hard to install into the car. Therefore I would have to mentally switch to voice navigation, which is not always confortable in combination with music expecially on longer trips. Therefore I would very appreciate bigger signs/arrows on the display.

Great app.You can find out more at the Sygic website.

Car apps : Audiogalaxy

With the the introduction of the Saab IQon system a support of  Spotify and Pandora music streaming services was mentioned. This is fine for regions with where this services are available but what about the other regions, such as I am living in ?  So I've tried to test a free streaming solution from my home PC to my Android based smartphone. Still in the faith, that the IQon system will offer a one-time payment data plan at least without roaming. The most important things for me were 1) reliability of the music stream, 2) user interface and 3) how much data it transfers, e.g. costs.

There are several applications for music streaming, some are free, some not. My choice was Audiogalaxy, due to positive user comments. Audiogalaxy consists of two parts - server part for the home PC, in my case Windows 7 64bit and a client part for the phone, in my case Android 2.2 on HTC Desire. Installation on both is trivial, however you must register on audiogalaxy.com. The logical condition for running the stream is, that  your home computer must be on and not hybernated. At my home PC with two disks the D: disk falls into sleep mode after a while of inactivity. No problem for Audiogalaxy. My only concern here is security, as I have no clue, what the server part broadcasts to the internet and how secure it is.

The user interface is elegant, nice and in most cases logical. It supports playlists, artists, albums and genres based browsing and a mode called Genie, which tries to find tracks in simillar mood as you listened before. What I am missing is my preferred browsing in directories instead  of to be dependent on mp3tags.

The reliability of the music stream is perfect. I've made a simple playlist and been driving first in the city and than out between villages and in the fields. Mostly HSDPA and sometimes Edge connections were available, in all areas without any single hiccup, pause or anything else. Some user comments were speaking about long waiting times between tracks. That was not my case, it played as I would have it stored on my SD card. Also with the "High Quality Audio" option switched on there were no skips. Technically this application works perfect.

The costs of the data transfer are the problem. I've played 6 mp3 songs (192kbps) which had together ~35MB and the transfer was the same 35MB. Total length of the 6 songs was 26 minutes. So no compression or any kind of data reduction technology. Since mp3 is a compression format itself, that is understandable. But that means 1.3 MB (megabytes) per minute and with 192kbps tracks I would ruin my 1GB/month data plan with 787 minutes which is 13.11 hours of streaming. With 320kbps mp3s that would be even 40% less = just below 8 hours.  This is definitely not a solution for me. But for people with unlimited data plan or people which does not have to pay their phone bill, that's a different story. Also wifi networks are fine. But for a car dependent on 3G better not. Roaming is also completely out of the game.

The application itself is great. But the costs to run it are still high. A bigger memory card is much cheaper, at least at the moment.  For the data measurement I've used Network Counter for Android, which seems to be accurate and measures the data by application.

Car apps : Ulysse Speedometer

There are several free apps for smartphones available. Ulysse Speedometer was one of them I liked a lot. Here is a small review.

The basic approach of the application is to warn you, both on display and with sound, when you reach a certain speed, which you can define. Although it is a nice feature to have, I can watch the speed by myself, so it has no advantage for me. But there are other useful features which I appreciated and used.


Firstly, it has a really nicely designed user interface, everything what you could be interested in is on one screen - speeds, driven distances and time. And compass plus elevation. It counts daily, weekly and monthly statistics of time and distances, which are available on a "click" or "slide" in the user interface, as if the author wanted to minimes the need for hitting the Menu button.

The compass works perfect with altitude information as a bonus. The UI is nicely designed, you can use it in portrait  and landscape mode but you have to allow the automatic switch in the menu.



The speed accuracy is simillar to other applications such as The Saab Phoenix Application so I assume, it depends on the GPS accuracy and conditions than on the application itself.

 

The HUD (heads-up display) mode works fine incl. settings of colours, saturation and brightness of the numbers. The application shows the speedwarnings in the HUD as well. The appearance of the HUD on the windscreen depends very on it's angle to the car dashboard. For my Saab 9-3 it was fine. I got the HUD numbers in around 1/3rd from the bottom of the windshield but to keep the sight in front of me clean, I had to place the phone close to the middle of the dashboard.

Since GPS is battery hungry, you have to have also a power cable long enough to reach the phone and does not hinder you anyhow. 

This is one of the nicest apps I had in the car. In order to get full statistics, you dont forget to switch the application on. I am using it on HTC Desire and Android 2.2. You can download Ulysse Speedometer for example from the Android Market or Appbrain for free. It does have ads in it. For me it's no problem.

Linux based mp3 player in Saab 9-5

These days, it's always a pity not to have mp3s in the car in form of mp3 capable CD player or any kind of input for external devices (AUX, USB, some card slot ...). I've found an interesting solution for older Saabs called Saablin. A smart guy has assembled a small computer and coded the player incl. remapping of buttons in the dashboard and other things.

Since the guy is living in Prague and I was on a trip there, I've asked him for a visit and short introduction of his installation in his 2001 Saab 9-5 Aero combi. We've met at one of the first sunny spring days in a nice part of Prague. It's a normal guy without visible signs of a geek background. Interior of his 9-5 (with re-mapped 2.3T petrol engine running also on E85 bioethanol) was something different.

The hardware part is a small custom built PC (documented here) connected to the CAN bus in the car. It's a standard PC but the trick here is to have an intelligent power supply which shuts itself down after ignition off, otherwise it would discharge the car battery. It can be tested with an old notebook, but for regular use it is very recommended to use a small PC because of the power supply.

The software part is Slackware Linux based and programmed in perl by using mpd (music player daemon) and Socket-CAN open source drivers and networking stack.

The result are playable mp3s from a notebook-sized 250GB hard-disk and several modes and possibilities for switching songs or fast rewind, usage of playlists or random play etc. The whole thing is controlled by re-mapped buttons below the 2-row display. For people who are not ready to use the re-mapped buttons there is also a bluetooth based solution in the mobile phone available. The player in the phone is Remuco, which can be used for many Linux based mp3 players on several mobile platforms (here on Nokia/Symbian, there is an Android client as well).

It's playing great, the PC in the boot needs some seconds to boot up, but than it plays fantastic. You can have your whole music collection with you in the car and it can be selected through a mobile phone from someone else in the car while you drive. In 2001 only the first car radios with mp3 capability came into the stores (i had a Kenwood in my 2001 Volvo, this one) but the original car installations didn't even started. Nowadays some sort of audio inputs are in nearly every car, but because many used cars are circulating, this solution will hold for several years from now.

It is a nice example of a custom computer implementation for the car. Since it uses CAN bus widely adopted in automotive industry, this solution is not only a Saab proprietary solution. Here you can find a partial list of cars equipped with CAN.

There are also some demo videos showing how this thing works on the original site.

Tachometer vs. GPS accuracy

It is always to hear, that tachometer in the car shows a bit slower speed than reality. But how slower ? An easy way to find out is to use the GPS. I did it, using the Saab PhoeniX Android application on the HTC Desire smartphone. Since the GPS often "could not decide" the speed, jumping +/- 1km, this is a best try at longer routes and using multiple measurements. Vehicle : Saab 9-3 convertible.

The results :

kmh		Mph (US)
Tachometer	GPS	Tachometer	GPS
50	49	31	30
60	58	37	36
70	68	44	42
80	77	50	48
90	87	56	54
100	97	62	60
110	107	68	67
120	116	75	72
130	126	81	78
140	136	87	85
150	146	93	91

As you can see, the accuracy of the tachometer go slightly down with the increasing speed against GPS. Still this is the most accurate tachometer I ever had. Please be aware, even if GPS is now the most accurate measurement technology widely available, there are differencies in  curves and the police radars are using different technology to measure your speed. Therefore with this I dont want to say, you should speed. It's your decision how fast you drive. Km were converted to Miles through this tool. 

From a trip to Prague I wish you a safe and relaxed ride on Saabs wherever you go.

Saab iQon connectivity system introduction and comments

There is another video from the Geneva Motor Show 2011 done by the almigthy SaabsUnited about the new Saab introduction of the iQon system in a form of an interview with Christopher McKinnon from Saab automobiles.

Although this is "only" a laptop presentation but sitting in the new Saab 9-3 Independence Edition, the informations are new and valuable. It is a walkthrough of the indroductory video from my previous post (2nd video) and a more deeper explanation of the concept, of what the developers of the system intend to do and what we can expect.

I'd like to sum up the highlights and comment a bit :

• Saab is aiming at a system (Google Android based) which updates itself continuously, the operating system as well as the applications

please allow users a voluntary update, some of them are conservative or satisfied with the current versions and as we've seen many times in the past, not all software updates are increasing quality

the use of Android is a bit disputable and risky because of the fragmentation of the whole system but what else ? Apple would require immense money, RIM and W7 are behind, Symbian is bad and dying. So it appears the only logical choice. 

a nice map of global mobile OS marketshare for February 2011 can be found here

• it will be high resolution full color 8" capacitor touchscreen and the intention is to replace as many buttons as possible from the dashboard

as many readers point out, there are some buttons and other parts of the dashboard, which are often used without looking at them. We all know, where our button for radio or A/C is. Please don't kill 'em all. On the other hand I am using Saab Infotainment System with touchscreen - this one - and it is ok. But Saab please keep the balance between screen and buttons.

btw. a nice description what a capacitor touchscreen is can be found here

• there will be an iQon store with applications ready for download

ffree or payed apps ? I assume both, but hopely Saab doesn't want to switch to a software house for car Android apps :)

• update of the maps in the GPS navigation system, as Saab has currently issues in Eastern Europe and certain places in Asia.

YES !!! I am one of the affected drivers in Eastern Europe (we call it Central Europe :) ). This will definitely not be for free, but hopely it will not costs as much as the DVD. And of course maps need to be updated everywhere.

• Saab intends to sell the system with a one-time internet subscription fee, so the customer does not has to have another Internet account or whatever.

This looks to be simillar to Kindle 3G and that would be great. Open question remains about the roaming charges as this system can be very data intensive. And there must be a fast connectivity anyway as for example update of maps can be tenths or hundreds of megabytes of data

• there will be a customer information channel about offers, discounts and other things

Fine but please not too much of this. Everybody is overflowed with informations. 

• there will be a streaming music functionality. Saab is currently working with Spotify and Pandora to enable this

Dear Saab, Spotify works in 7 european countries and Pandora is U.S. only. We love you, we are patient and understand that these are the big markets for you (btw. where is China and Russia ?) but for all us in the rest of the planet, would it be possible to not forget us ? That means allowing to install alternative applications like mp3 players with streaming functionality, browsers etc.

• iQon will include remote diagnostics of the vehicle and very carefully indicated that it may be possible to upgrade also other software parts of the car, for example ECU

  
ECU software upgrade through the Net ? OK. To be honest, this is hard to believe at the moment. But as a vision (or joke) it's fine :) 

It's a great concept and at the start now. I can imagine, there are zillions of issues to solve and with very powerful companies to speak. The future Saab is showing here is astounding. Looking forward to what is coming :) Cross fingers !

The video :


Many thanks to SaabsUnited for the work done. This is very useful.

Waze

Waze is a crowdsourcing mobile application for drivers. I'm using it on HTC Desire (Android 2.2) for several weeks already and it is a kind of application which deserves a short review.

What it does :
It is a free GPS navigation, but the main power of Waze is it's social aspect. While driving, you can send warnings about traffic or weather situation (for ex. construction or fog), police traps etc to other users connected to the network. If you slow down in traffic jam, the waze app automatically shows the slow parts on the map for other waze users, whose can than choose other routes.

You see other "wazers" on map and can "ping" them. Also Waze contains a point system for activity (just points plus charts for users with most points) and you can drive for points through several bonus places shown on the map. However after a time these bonus places dissapeared from my map.

You can even help to build the maps, as all the maps in Waze are created by users. I've never tried that.

Pros : 
1. Useful : although the Waze community in my city is relatively small, it helped me several times to mind the traffic jams.
2. Nice : ... to see, that other people using the same app as me and contributing to it.
3. Multiplatform : iPhone, Android, WM, Symbian, Blackberry (beta)
4. Dynamic : i like to see, that Waze is improving things
5. You can use it in a convertible :) 

Contras :
1. Battery : consumes a lot of battery. You have to have your smartphone connected to the power socket in the car.
2. Security : you have to be very careful to use it while driving. Look on the road, not on the phone.
3. Minor bugs : sometimes less important parts of the application - groups and points - aren't loading correctly.

Waze has a nice intro video :
(click on "OK" on the blue screen or on the bullet points in the upper left corner)


And in reality than it looks similar to this :

Nice app. Looking forward for further updates.