SpotON Radio (Free) by Swedish Application Development is a new app that utilizes Spotify’s API. Think of it as a mix of Pandora and Spotify. In order to use the app, you will need a Spotify Premium account.
Spotify made a big splash last year, since it was finally
available in the U.S.. In November, they announced that they were
opening their API to third party developers, and now we have a fantastic little app that makes full use of this. Say hello to SpotON Radio.
The design of the app is exceptionally well done. It’s clean, minimal, and has a bit of retro going on. In fact, it’s one of my favorite things about the app. I am also a fan of their icon – it’s simple and stands out on its own.
Once you log in with your Spotify Premium account, you’ll see the main screen of the app – your stations. The app will automatically give you a few stations depending on your top artists in Spotify. If what you want isn’t there, you can create your own station.
Creating your own station will give you several options: Search, Browse the Top 100, and Your Spotify Top Artists. Search will allow you to search for the artist you want, as long as Spotify has them in their collection. Regardless, when you find the artist you want from those three options, just tap on it to select it and create a new station.
If you’ve used Pandora, you should understand how this works. The app will start playing a song from the artist you select and also generate a random playlist of songs from similar artists.
At the top, you will see what the station is based off of. The majority of the screen will be taken up by album artwork from the currently playing song. You can choose to give it a thumbs-up to reprogram the station to include more songs like it, or give it a thumbs-down if you don’t like it (it will also skip the song).
Underneath the like/dislike bar is a bar that shows you who the artist is and the song name. A share button is found here to share the song to Facebook or you can add the track to a Spotify playlist you have (you can’t create new playlists from SpotON). The bottom has playback controls: Pause/Play, Forward, and an audio scrubber.
Unfortunately, it seems that the app does not currently support AirPlay, as I could not find the controls integrated into the app or playback. I hope that the developers can add this in the future – AirPlay is a must for any audio or media app in the Store now. However, the app does have multitasking support and lock screen display, which is a plus.
If you want to hide the music player, you can do this by tapping on the top bar where it says “Hide,” or even just the SpotOn logo. This will take you to Station Info (you can also see this if you tap on a different station), where you can see the how many songs have been played (along with a count of how many likes and dislikes you had). Additionally, you can share the station on Facebook, turn the station into a Spotify playlist, or delete the station. The last part shows you more related artists, should you feel like creating a station out of them as well.
SpotON Radio has a Settings tab, though it only really has the option of toggle station sharing on Facebook. Other stuff found here are Facebook and Twitter links, sharing the app with friends, rating them in the App Store, various help links, and logging out of your Facebook and Spotify account.
I enjoyed my use with the app, as this definitely eliminates the need to use Pandora if you are a Spotify Premium user. However, the app did crash on me a few times though, so hopefully they iron out performance issues in the next update.
Despite this small issue, SpotON Radio is definitely a shining example of what developers can do with Spotify’s open API. If you have a Spotify Premium account, make sure to check out SpotON Radio and let us know what you think in the comments!
