Choosing a music streaming service

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been streaming music for several years now and have yet to find the perfect service. Since I haven’t looked into it for a couple years, maybe something new (to me) is out there. Right now I subscribe to two services, Spotify and Rhapsody.

Rhapsody has a much better queue than Spotify and we use it to play tracks stored locally. Its main detractions are that it isn’t capable of gapless playback (insanely important to us) and is limited to two mobile devices. It has great editorial content—bands have an expandable blurb to get a few details about new finds and old friends.

Spotify has two main advantages for us. First, it has a gapless playback option. We listen to a lot of live music (Grateful Dead, String Cheese Incident, etc.) who blend songs into each other, and micro-gaps of silence between tracks are painfully jarring. Spotify also allows us to put its app on several mobile devices so we aren’t restricted to listening on one or two phones. Another Spotify benefit is the availability of apps (we love Wakify, a music alarm clock).

Spotify’s main detraction (the only one I can think of, but it’s big) is that its queue is infuriatingly dysfunctional. Unless there’s an update I’m unaware of, you can’t simply clear out the queue, can’t drag songs around to change the order of songs, have minimal control over what’s added, and can’t delete individual songs on there. There are workarounds that involve creating playlists and the like, but they’re imperfect and a pain in the ass.

So besides gapless playback, a fully manageable queue and the ability to use the service on multiple devices, here’s what else is important: [ul]
[li]Full control over what I listen to. I love Pandora and the like for certain moods, but it’s not what I’m looking for. [/li][li]A deep catalogue should go without saying. [/li][li]Personal library management. We have tons of music that’s unavailable commercially, so streaming off our server is crucial. [/li][li]Offline playing on devices is an absolute necessity because we frequently listen without having an internet connection. [/li][li]Unlimited listening. I don’t get people who still ‘buy’ their music song-by-song. Is even a thing anymore?[/li][li]No forced social media connections. I have no friends. [/ul][/li]
So, what’s out there? What do you like about your service? Dislike?

2

I listen to Rdio. It doesn’t support gapless playback, which sounds like a dealbreaker for you. And you can’t integrate your own library with it. But I like it for its user interface (way, way better than Spotify IMO) and music discovery tools. I don’t need a music app to be Facebook, but I like being able to follow other people with complementary tastes so that their selections float up in my Trending page.

Apple is poised to introduce a new streaming service soon, supposedly; maybe that will be more to your liking.

3

Thanks. Yeah, without gapless a lot of music is not quite unplayable, but if there’s a choice I’ll avoid it.

Interested in seeing what Apple does, but their past gives me little hope that it’ll match my interests without having some tagalong bloat or restrictions that make it unpalatable (we have a few Macs in the house, but I’m not putting iTunes or Quicktime on my PCs or Linux boxes. No offence to those that like it, it’s just not for me).