nuTsie

As I was writing this post, in my favorite Capitol Hill area coffeehouse, this product suddenly freed itself from it’s beta nametag and launched a completly redisigned interface right before my eyes. Nutsie, that’s an anagram for iTunes, is not a beta anymore it seems – but it’s too amazing for me to pass by.

    

The above screenshot, with the black background and beta tag, is the before picture and no longer exists – though I liked it more than the newer interface on the right.

Nutsie allows you to access your iTunes music library from any PC with internet access, or from your mobile phone.  As I have yet to try the phone application I’ll mostly stick to discussing the web service.

Likes / Features: 

• Export and Upload your entire iTunes library and playlists to Nutsie with your ‘Library.xml’ file (which is a lot easier to do than it sounds).
• You are not uploading or storing any music files on Nutsie, they save your playlist information and stream from the files already on their own servers. 
• No software to download or install.
• Not only is Nutsie free for you, but the artists receive royalties when you listen to your own songs – the only service I know of that could technically monetize your illegally downloaded music in a good way.
• Great, clear playback quality (well, depending on your speakers too – but I thought it was very good).
• You have access to other people’s playlists and all the music on Nutsie, so you can share your iTunes music with your friends…
• Or you can integrate recommendations and the Nutsie music database with your own songs through something called the “Seredipity Slider” which lets you choose on a scale of 0 to 100% how much you’d like suggested songs vs. your own library.
• “Buy it / Grab it / Hate it” options on songs (similiar to thumbs up or down on Pandora)
• Additional content includes artist information, song lyrics, and tagged YouTube music videos.
• Dave Dederer (of the Presidents of the United States) is a VP at Nutsie’s parent company, Melodeo (a Seattle based company).
• Nutsie also offers an iTunes Sidebar thats still in invite only stage.
• Check out the 2008 Sasquatch Festival playlist that just went up.
• The Nutsie mobile phone application will be the music player of choice for all Blackberry devices, per this article.

Flaws / Possible Drawbacks:

• To keep it legal, they have to keep it like a streaming radio station – which means all your playlists are on shuffle (you can’t play a song on demand) and though you can skip ahead, there is no ‘go back’ option.

• There is a slightly limited music library, which means all of your songs may not be available, though so far I’ve found only a few local and lesser known artists to be missing.

• Some versions are different. For example, my library has the song “To Hell with Good Intentions” by Mclusky – however, Nutsie played the live, full 8 minutes and 44 seconds version from the Mcluskyism Limited Box Set. I was still pretty happy with it.

• If you add new songs to your iTunes library, you’ll have to upload your xml file again or the new songs won’t show up. 

• It may take a while for your music library to be ready the first time you set it up – though for me it was under two minutes.

• All mobile phones are not supported yet, just these.

• As far as I can tell, there’s no desktop player or facebook application yet. I want to listen with my browser closed and just a mini player running – and I want to show my friends what I’m listening to like this with statistics analyzing my usage and share my playlists on my social networks.

• Good odds they will start charging for a subscription service, at least with the cell phone application.

Link: Nutsie.com

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