A couple months ago, I took the plunge. I canceled my Spotify premium account, and was grooving on the Apple iRadio option on iTunes. While I missed the “on demand” library, I thought that the radio stations on iTunes radio were great, with a very good algorithm at grouping songs in genre’s and subgenre’s.
But a couple weeks ago I reactivated my Spotify premium membership. It was an easy decision, as with the launch of iTunes 11.0.3, the version that brought the radio, it also brought a version that was a buggy piece of crap.
It used to be that the Windows version if iTunes sucked, but the Mac version was pretty solid. But this changed that equation for the worse. Instead of fixing the windows version, now the Mac version is garbage. It crashes, it hangs (I have force quit that program more times than I can count), it uses huge amounts of processor time (often pegging one processor), and in general it just sucks.
Yes, the radio stations on Spotify are less awesome, but at least their software doesn’t make my machine whimper and crash.
I will continue to listen to iRadio, but Spotify will remain a monthly charge. And I get all their on demand music that I don’t get on iTunes.
