Rdio vs Simfy vs Rara vs Deezer in SA

I run Shoutcast chilled at home and the rock feed at the store for our clients.

Local radio can kiss my ar$e.
Down here in Cape Town, your only bet to hear a proportionate amount of local music is Smile FM.
SA radio is trying so hard to kill local music, but they are not getting it right, due to streaming and social media.

Another classic example of the person in the street saying no to greedy corporates/****ty content providers and doing their own thing on other available channels.
 
Simfy Availability:

A while ago many of my Favourite albums got licences revoked. I'm not sure whether it's a regional licence thing or whether it was Merlin revoking them (http://musically.com/2013/10/03/simfy-the-latest-streaming-service-to-arouse-wrath-of-merlin/), not sure how to find out who is responsible for putting each album on Simfy.

I really got the feeling that I was using Simfy (and all similar services) wrong. It should not be your CD collection, it should be a discovery service and the things you like you should buy so that it can't suddenly disappear from your life. But, if the less popular and nearly unknown albums don't stay around on Simfy, you can't discover them in the first place.

Simfy Mobile App:

The Android simfy app is horrible. The iOS simfy app is great. No other way to put it. I have about 1600 songs marked as favourites and on the Android app the album and artist covers have to be reloaded every time I open the app. On iOS they seem to stay cached a lot better. On my Galaxy S4 the app takes long enough to load the list of songs that the screen will lock, which means you need to start over when you unlock. On my iPhone 4s, it's not fast but it's much more responsive and useful. The lack of lock-screen play controls is also quite frustrating (PIN lock). Most audio apps have some sort of pause+next interface on the lock screen, but simfy doesn't. On iOS, the global media controls are always available and always controls simfy when it's playing, which helps a lot.

I still have many months left on simfy, but was thinking about trying the others. Rdio looked the nicest, but the earlier mention about bad quality put me off.
 
After some more fiddling with my comparing Simfy vs. Rdio vs. Deezer (Rada got no free trial, so no go there) , i have now switched over to Deezer. I have noticed Deezer have an API available for 3rd party apps to tap into Deezer's music. So you can, with a Deezer account, use these 3rd party apps and get quite a variety of extra experiences, especially in terms of Discovery Tools. There's a few mobile apps that also taps into Deezer.

My issues with Rdio was it's actually pretty darn slow on my phone, it also struggles to play music on a slower connection i.e. EDGE (yes, in gauteng i still get EDGE alot more than you'd think) ,whereas both Simfy and Deezer had very little issues.

Deezer also have offline modes on the Desktop so i don't have to stream my music while i'm online gaming etc.

Simfy's last straw for me was their rather sad android app, it also lacks features that is on the desktop version (such as the "Radio" feature) making it a bit of a dealbreaker feeling obligated to use the desktop version over mobile.
 
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I have only tried Rdio, which works well in offline mode on the IOS app. However I struggle with smooth Rdio playback when streamed from a desktop Mac. Most of the day it is unusable. I would have expected that a Afrihost 4Mb Business DSL package had sufficient bandwidth to stream audio reliably, not true with Rdio. Disappointing because I really like the Rdio interface, so I might try Simfy next.
 
Gavin107 said:
I have only tried Rdio, which works well in offline mode on the IOS app. However I struggle with smooth Rdio playback when streamed from a desktop Mac. Most of the day it is unusable. I would have expected that a Afrihost 4Mb Business DSL package had sufficient bandwidth to stream audio reliably, not true with Rdio. Disappointing because I really like the Rdio interface, so I might try Simfy next.
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Yea, i agree, that's why i switched to Deezer from Rdio. Ultimately i prefer Rdio, but something about their service is slow. It takes ages to start playing songs on mobile with constant playback errors, and it is overall struggling to stream music on PC.

On a side note, i noticed Deezer now also have a Samsung Smarthub App. This implies if you got a Samsung TV / Blueray Drive you can load up Deezer directly on there and play songs .

Simfy's streaming is certainly better than Rdios, but the service overall seem a little "Vanilla" to me compared to what Deezer is offering.
 
Deezer iOS app works really well and does all I need.Simfy app also good but Deezer just a far slicker design.
 
Bryn26 said:
If anyone wants a full free month with Simfy (instead of the usual 14 day trial) as a new member, you can help both me and yourself out (I also get a free month) by signing up using this link:

https://www.simfyafrica.com/launchp...en?token=CB308773-197C-457F-9783-6979290D2C3C

It will require payment details, but you can choose cellphone billing which only requires a valid cell number. It takes a few seconds to confirm the transaction with your phone and is completely free. Simfy will confirm that billing only commences after the trial. Once your account is active, just go to the billing screen on their website and opt out. I've done this with both my brothers and it took about 2 minutes each.
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Done. Logging into simfy...will report back...
 
BlackWasp said:
Done. Logging into simfy...will report back...
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Thanks. I hope you enjoy Simfy! If you have some gripes with it but like the streaming aspect, be sure to check out the competition. Deezer, Rdio, Grooveshark and Rara are some other options.
 
Deezer has a 6-month half price special. Quite nice, the web interface is pleasant to use and has more info on the artists. Only thing I'm trying to find out is how to have a Radio channel or playlist with all songs from my favourited albums, doesn't seem to be possible here.
 
Aessa said:
Deezer has a 6-month half price special. Quite nice, the web interface is pleasant to use and has more info on the artists. Only thing I'm trying to find out is how to have a Radio channel or playlist with all songs from my favourited albums, doesn't seem to be possible here.
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Sounds good. I have been using Simfy now since Feb 2014, and I like the service. Here and there small issues but overall good value. Unfortunately I have not used any other streaming service so I cannot compare. As for Simfy, I have never looked for a song I couldnt find. I hear good things about Deezer though. Peace.
 
Correction to above, just discovered Flow:
http://support.deezer.com/customer/portal/articles/1487776-what-is-flow-
Basically what I was looking for more or less, but on Simfy I could shuffle through my own All-Songs list, old-school discovery.

Simfy is fine, but I find some of my albums disappearing again and since I last looked Deezer expanded what they had. I now find more music on Deezer, but some albums are still only on Simfy.

The annoying bit was building up my favourites library on Deezer. Even with some python magic there's still a log of clicking to do. Will see how it goes.
 
Tired of Deezer's outdated app and want to jump ship. Any recommendations? I like Spotify but it costs more. Installed Simfy and uninstalled it 15 minutes later because the app is rubbish; possibly the worst of the lot.
 
Have you tried Rdio? They've got a very nice app, definitely better than Simfy or Deezer.
 
I'm actually back on simfy and staying for a while. Deezer's web interface is really nice, but they use Joint Stereo so heavily I thought my laptop speakers were on the way out. I found Deezer's mobile app quite nice actually, but that's compared to Simfy. Simfy's mobile app is quite basic, but it works. Deezer's Flow discovery/play-all works OK. I discovered some nice new music but then it started to recycle the list. I guess it will expand when I manually play other music, but a discovery flow should not lock itself down like that. Simfy's discovery is sort of manual, unless you make use of last.fm. It would be nice if they could notify you if a favourite artist suddenly has a new album available (release or updated streaming licences). Last time I said my music was disappearing, after Deezer I went through all my Artists on Simfy again and found that most albums were added back under new labels or years and quite a few new ones as well.

Basically:
* Deezer uses 128kbps for most if not all of my albums, Simfy seems to use 320kbps. This is based on looking at file sizes on Android as well as generally being able to download much much more before running out of space with Deezer.
* Deezer support is generic and irrelevant. Simfy support is great and near instant. On Saturday I reported a bug, got a response and on Monday they released an update.
** With Deezer, I asked how or where I can put in a request for access to new content. I got an irrelevant generic response. Also no explanation on what "Not yet encoded" means (rather, whether they plan to encoded it or what).
** With Simfy, there's a specific Feedback button with an option "Music Request".
 
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Anyone else notice that Deezer subscriptions are quoted as 5 & 10 euros instead of the ZAR prices quoted in the article?

edit: please disregard post. Deezer for some reason associated my SA IP with France when i signed up and geolocked me to France
 
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ebendl said:
Tried it originally, but didn't support the ART runtime on Android at that stage so I deleted it.
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I had that problem too, but fortunately it's been fixed with the latest update.
 
Yeah I have been using simfy since September 2012 and it automatically bills my MTN Top Up account with R60 so now they are charging R49 which is cool and the fact that inclusive airtime gets used to so I don't even "see" the debits really.

I think their app could be better cause its more of a app if you know the songs name and album you are looking for. Discovering new trending music is hard.
 
DarkDenim said:
Tired of Deezer's outdated app and want to jump ship. Any recommendations? I like Spotify but it costs more. Installed Simfy and uninstalled it 15 minutes later because the app is rubbish; possibly the worst of the lot.
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Did you download the simfy app or the simfy africa app? The German simfy app Is horrible, that's why they made their own.
 
App notification today from Deezer:
http://try.deezer.com/enhancedsound_en/

So previously they claimed up to 320kbps. It was certainly not for web streaming, which really just leaves mobile as the major other option, which they now admit was not high quality yet. Wondering what listening methods then were in fact providing up to 320kbps quality. Should be interesting to see how far "up to" will be for which albums.
 
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